Two years of volcan01010: Highlights of 2012

This week is the second anniversary of volcan01010.  With this post, I want to give an overview of what I have been writing about over the past year.  If you are new to the blog, then it should give you an idea of what it is all about: Volcanoes, Iceland and (geo)scientific computing.

Volcan:

The volcano posts of this year, as last year, are quite Icelandy.  They cover specific aspects of the recent Grímsvötn and Eyjafjallajökull eruptions, as well has some general volcanology themes.

• An Icelandic eruption 100 times more powerful than Eyjafjallajökull
  A feature-length post explaining how the outcome of a big Icelandic explosion may not be as bad as you imagine.  If you read anything from last year, read this one.

• Ten swimming pools of travel chaos
  For all the trouble that it caused, the volume of Eyjafjalljökull magma that formed the ash that reached Europe was actually quite small.

• Gas, not ice, makes subglacial rhyolite explode
  A feature-length post explaining why volcanoes explode, with an icy twist.  This is one of the posts that I started the blog in order to write.

• Happy Anniversary Grímsvötn
  How variable wind directions split the Grímsvötn plume and showed that real volcanic eruptions are always more complicated than the theory suggests.

• Sounds of the Underground
  Sped up seismic data lets you ‘hear’ earthquakes and eruptions from an earthworm’s point of view.  Hear Colima volcano sing.

I spent 18 weeks of last year on fieldwork in Iceland.  It was busy, but I managed a few posts from the field.  For 3 weeks, I had @al_monteith with me, so check out his blog for more Iceland fieldwork photos and stories.

• Fieldwork update: Progress map, river crossings and bulldozers
  Campervan river crossings, pumice quarry bulldozers and lots of dots on the map.

• Iceland horse fun
  Iceland horses have a lot of personality – a postcard from the field.

• Glacier of the mountains of the islands
  Why is Eyjafjallajökull called Eyjafjallajökull?

• A visual estimate of the proportions of mixtures: pumice vs. lithics
  A true volcan01010 post – explaining the rocks amongst the pumice and Python code to make charts of different proportions.

01010:

• Science conference posters with Scribus
  An open source desktop publishing program.  The post includes a template that imagines what The Stone Roses would take to a bands conference.

• Easily change coordinate projection systems in Python with pyproj
  A quick guide to reprojecting coordinates into whatever system you want.  It includes code that calculates the letters in British National Grid references.

• Processing ARSF remote sensing data with open source GIS tools
  Some hints for getting started with the open source GRASS GIS with examples from real data.

I also still get lots of hits on my All the software a geoscientist needs. For free! post, which is good as this is another of the posts that I always wanted to write.

General geology / Environment:

• On the geology of Prometheus
  Prometheus was partly filmed in Iceland, but how much actually made it onto the big screen.  Not much!

• Insight into climate debate at the Volcanism and the Atmosphere conference
  How volcanoes influence the climate, and an interesting look at the debates at the cutting-edge of climate science.

• UK Environment Advisor’s talk on climate change
  A very clear but alarming talk outlining the climate-related troubles ahead.  No hype, no dramatic music, and no cute baby polar bears, but lots of convincing data.

Stories from 2011

If you liked any of these, there is another batch in the One year of volcan01010 post.

Coming up in 2013

It’s been a busy year.  I managed to write something new at least once per month this year and I hope to keep that pace through the next year.  When you follow loads of journalists on Twitter it makes your productivity feel really low, but they don’t have maps to make, samples to analyse or students to teach!  Some things in the pipeline include the results of the Grímsvötn 2011 public sticky tape sampling exercise and a video on how to use Python for science.  Stay tuned.

Subscribe, then tell all your friends

The best way to follow volcan01010 is to subscribe to the RSS feed.  If you’ve never heard of RSS, read this guide.  It lets you keep track of posts that you have read and tells you when a new one is out.  You can also follow me on Twitter (@volcan01010).  This way you get updates with other news and links that I think are cool.  Remember that you can also find old posts on the Every Post Ever page.

Volcan01010 now has 459 followers on Twitter (up from 201 last year), and in the last 12 months the blog scored 20,897 page views from 10,961 unique visitors in 147 countries (with the vast majority in the UK and USA).  The numbers of hits are similar to the previous year, but there were no eruptions in Iceland this year (during the eruption in May 2011, the Grímsvötn eruption – Frequently Asked Questions pulled in 1,400 hits in a single day).  Traffic comes in more steadily now and is spread across more posts.  It is satisfying that there hasn’t been a single day in the past six months when fewer than 10 people visited the blog.

If you find the blog interesting or useful, then please tell all your friends.  Then tell them to tell all their friends, too.