It started out like the camping trip from hell, but it turned into the research expedition of a lifetime for three University of British Columbia volcanologists.
It started out like the camping trip from hell, but it turned into the research expedition of a lifetime for three University of British Columbia volcanologists.
Colin Rowell and Johan Gilchrist, PhD students in UBC’s department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences, travelled in late May with professor Mark Jellinek to meet French and Peruvian research teams at Sabancaya—a so-called “laboratory volcano” in the Peruvian Andes. Such volcanoes have short and frequent eruptions that are safely viewed from a few kilometres away. The Peruvians had invaluable local knowledge of the volcano, so conditions seemed ideal for the international team to observe and collect data.
Conditions, of course, can change.
Rowell and Jellinek beat Gilchrist to the mountains by a day. Their first night was a harbinger of what was to come. After a slow, four-wheel drive along rocky routes that were barely marked, they hastily set up camp on an exposed plateau at 5,000 metres before night fell on the desert mountains. The temperature dropped to -25 C overnight, and they felt it.
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Image via University of British Columbia.
