The Valles Caldera

Gather 'round, children, and I will rap at you about my field area (provided my research ever gets off the ground). Most of you have never been there, but it is like hella beautiful. I'll stick a bunch of pictures at the end for your ocular pleasure. The Valles Caldera National Preserve was formerly a ranch held by the ubiquitous (in New Mexico anyway) Baca family. In 2000 the gummint bought it, and it is now semi-open public land.
The Valles is a caldera that formed 1.5-1.1 million years ago as the result of massive eruptions (600 cubic kilometers) from the magma chamber beneath. See below for an aerial photograph (hard to decipher, I know) of the caldera. The roundish feature is the rim of the caldera, and all the flat-looking areas within are meadows. The mountains in the middle of the caldera are the resurgent dome, which the link above talks about.

I've now been here a number of times, and I just can't get over how beautiful it is, especially with a little snow blanket on it. Enjoy some pictures below; hopefully, I'll soon have some more current ones from the upcoming months!




Oh, I have more at home from non-winter. Maybe I'll put some up later.

New House

So we moved into a new house this past week. Well, it's a really old house, but new to us. And completely remodeled. It's very very nice. It is also half the size of our Socorro house, or possibly even a little less. To get an idea of how much nicer this house is (despite its advanced age), consider this: the sloping floors in our Socorro house we considered ghetto; the sloping floors in this house we consider quaint.
The new house is made entirely out of adobe, and I haven't yet flipped on the swamp cooler, except once to test it. It's funny for those of us who have lived in Phoenix how people here think that 85 degrees is really hot.
We are having internet issues at the new house, which is why Alison and I haven't updated in a while. She's in DC right now getting orientated to the damn liberal media. I hope to take some pictures of the house soon, and put them up somewhere so you all can see it. Maybe I can have the house organized before Alison gets back. In the meantime, here is a mock-up of the house that I did in powerpoint to whet your appetite.

Hail yeah!

It just hailed here. Crazy amounts of hail, but it lasted no more than a couple minutes. The hail never got more than pea sized. But have I ever mentioned that I just love hail? Hail. There's something that seems vaguely unnatural about little spheres of ice falling from the sky.
The only thing I don't like about the hail is that it brings up many trepidations here in Socorro, due to this event.

The Rio Grande in trouble? Who knew?!

The Rio made the list of the top ten most endangered rivers worldwide. The outflow is so low at the Gulf of Mexico that sea water is backing up into the estuary. This is threatening freshwater fish at the end of the river. According to the article, there are 69 species of fish (including the endangered silvery minnow) that are only found in the Rio.
I wish that the government here could enact legislation forcing water conservation. There's little to no grass in this state (unlike the incredible water sink Phoenix), but there's also whackloads of agriculture and (open, evaporating) canals running right through Socorro. But I also know that this kind of legislation won't happen, because people are comfortable and uninformed, and would rather jeopardize the water resources future of the desert than become interested in what is happening. This is the story in pretty much every environmental field today, not just water resources.