Profile

I am a student who lives on campus in Norwich.. I have a dog at my family house who is a golden Labrador. I LOVE cooking and making cakes for everyone! My favourite thing to do is go outdoors for a walk or a bike ride! I also love swimming (especially outside if its warm enough!), or anything water based! My favourite food is tacos or chocolate! Apart from my work, which looks at earthquakes and volcanoes, I am also really interested in space, the oceans, the human body, and all things science!

My work takes me all over the world to visit volcanoes to help understand them! At the moment I am looking at a volcano in Montserrat which is in the Caribbean (very hot!). I look at the earthquakes (which is what happens when the ground shakes) to help understand if we can monitor the volcano and when it will erupt again!

Earthquakes occur when the ground grumbles, and this is sometimes due to magma (hot molten rock) pushing its way to the surface. As the magma moves through the rock it causes all the surrounding ground to shake, resulting in lots of small earthquakes! If we can track these small earthquakes we can see where the magma is moving too, and if the volcano is going to erupt!

I went out to Montserrat a couple of years ago and visited the observatory that helps monitor the volcano. The observatory has lots of fancy equipment that they use to measure earthquakes, ground movement and gases! They also have a helicopter that flies over the volcano to see if there are any changes!

I also visited Hawaii where we were able to walk over the volcano near to the active lava that was coming out! We had to very careful not to get to close to the lava, as its so hot that it would burn your shoes and you! We also went to pickup out seismometers from an experiment that we had run. Seismometers are pieces of equipment that measure the ground movement from an earthquake. We can use several of these around the volcano to locate the earthquake and to count how many earthquakes there have been each day!