Abstract

Alaska is home to over forty historically active volcanoes, including the site of the largest volcanic eruption of the Twentieth Century. Over half of these volcanoes are currently monitored by the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) - a joint program of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAFGI), and the State of Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys (ADGGS). AVO was formed in 1988, and uses federal, state, and university resources to monitor and study Alaska's hazardous volcanoes, to predict and record eruptive activity, and to mitigate volcanic hazards to life and property. In addition to the threats posed by volcanic activity to local populations, ash erupted from any of Alaska's volcanoes, even the most remote, poses a serious threat to aircraft. This includes planes flying over the North Pacific between North America and Asia carrying more than 10,000 people and millions of dollars in goods each day. In the last decade AVO embarked on an aggressive effort to install monitoring equipment on all historically active volcanoes and expand its satellite-based monitoring in order to prevent a repeat of the incident in 1989 when a 747 lost all power after flying into a volcanic ash cloud and almost crashed before restarting the engines and landing safely in Anchorage. 

Biography

Miss. Adleman began living and working in Alaska in 1995 as an Information Specialist intern staffing the King Salmon Visitor Center for the Becharof and Alaska Peninsula National Wildlife Refuge. She continued to spend summers in Alaska as a Park Ranger based at Brooks Camp in Katmai National Park while earning a BS in geology at the University of Washington. Her favorite hike to lead as a Katmai Ranger was the daily tour into the park’s volcanic region, the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. During the academic year she studied the geochemistry of undersea volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest. After graduating college in 2000 Miss. Adleman spent four months volunteering with the USGS at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, living and working on Kilauea volcano. While there, she was responsible for maintaining and updating the web reporting of the Kilauea eruption. In the winter of 2001 she moved back to the mainland and began working as a contractor with the USGS Earthquake Hazards Team in Menlo Park, CA. Miss Adleman joined scientists working along the San Andreas fault, reporting their progress and research on the Northern California Earthquake Hazards Team web pages. In the winter of 2002 Miss Adleman moved back to Alaska and began as a USGS contractor with the Alaska Volcano Observatory managing the completion of geologic maps and other publications. This fall she will begin graduate studies in volcanology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.