Summary: Volcanoes are large, dynamic features of our planet. And yet, we often turn to small, static experiments to better understand them. I will take you from a remote area in the Chilean Andes, full of lava and pumice from South America's largest historical eruptions, to experimental research labs where these volcanic rocks are re-melted and re-cooled in special furnaces. The mineral types, shapes, and chemical compositions that form from these experimental magmas give us a "key" to interpret what we see in the erupted rocks. In this talk, I will show you exactly how that key works and what it means for Volcán Quizapu, currently ranked as the 10th most dangerous volcanic system in all of Chile.

Biography: Dr. First is an Assistant Professor of Geology at Macalester College. She hails from Atlanta, GA and holds Bachelor's degrees in Geology and French from the University of Georgia. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, studying magmas in an experimental research lab and seeing volcanoes in person whenever she could. Postdocs at Brown and Cornell focused even further from home, on lunar rocks and exoplanets. Now settled at Macalester, she will be setting up her own experimental lab to learn about melting, crystallization, diffusion, and other fundamental processes that govern the behavior of magmas on Earth and other planets. She is also excited to be teaching several courses, including Mineralogy and Volcanoes.

Summary: On the morning of November 1, 1755, the feast of All Saints’ Day, the city of Lisbon was nearly entirely destroyed in an earthquake, a tidal wave, and the resulting fires. The Great Lisbon Earthquake became the defining natural disaster of the Enlightenment, and it sparked a crisis in European philosophy as well as reinvigorating scholarship on earthquakes.  This talk explores the connections between philosophy and early seismology, as theorists of earth—in particular the Russian scholar Mikhail Lomonosov—worked to rescue Gottfried Leibniz’s philosophical optimism from Voltaire’s withering post-Lisbon critiques by finding a purpose—metallogenesis—for earthquakes. Be ready for poetry and phlogiston!

Biography: Anna Graber is Assistant Professor of History of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota. She holds appointments in Minnesota’s HST program and in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Her research is on the meanings and uses of the Earth and its products in Russian history. In the book manuscript she is preparing for publication, “Tsardom of Rock: Science, Society, and Enlightenment in Russia’s Mining Empire,” she examines how in the eighteenth-century leaders of the mining industry developed new methods of knowing and ruling Russia’s natural environment and imperial subjects, in the process forging the modern Russian Empire.