If there’s something you want to sample or just to see up close, you’re going to go do it no matter what. Part of the process of becoming a geologist is learning how to manage risk in the field. It’s important because often you don’t have the option of going back someplace with proper climbing equipment or whatever, and being able to look at or sample something hard to reach is often absolutely key to your research.

I almost can’t believe some of the stuff that I’ve done in the field. When you’re there, all you’re thinking about is getting to what you need to see. It’s more important than anything. This sort of short-circuits the normal part of your brain that would prevent you from doing risky things.

Serious injuries are relatively rare, though I’m sure they happen. Every geologist has stories of their series of field injuries of course, often made worse than they have to be because you want to push on and complete your field work even while injured. Often injuries result from goofing off and taking risks outside the context of things you actually need to do. That’s certainly true in my case – my only relatively serious incidents were the result of goofing off (and I nearly killed someone when an enormous boulder dislodged from a place I was climbing and fell right next to someone so I don’t take these incidents lightly! – part of the learning process.)

(obviously the vulcanologist is full of win….)

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/149714/duck-cover

You do that to prove something to yourself.

You’d have to build a lot of proprietary components to have the dexterity needed to get in and out and grab what you need via remote control and will cost a ton.

1) make protective lava-suit from lava* [1]
2) make lava-airplane from lava [1]
3) have cake every morning! [1]

* If there is an existing, but non-functioning lava-airplane, you may try to make a smaller, functioning lava-airplane from parts of the larger lava-airplane [2]

[1] Sendak, M. “A Novel Method for Sudden, Unanticipated Evacuation”, Proceedings of the International Virgin Sacrifice Society, 1970 (see illus.)

[2] Aldrich, R. ‘Fenix Flight”, Lava Aviation Quarterly, vol 128, 1965 (republished in a longer, but modified form, 2004)

‘That’s hot.”

Grabbing lava from as close to the vent as possible and then quenching it in a bucket of water turns the lava to glass which keeps the composition almost identical to that being erupted.

If they left the lava to cool naturally its composition would change since the different minerals in the lava crystallise at different temperatures, some of the high temperature minerals don’t travel far from the vent so a sample taken further away would be misleading.

Knowing the composition of the erupted lava at source lets you know if the magma’s composition is changing through an eruption because the magma chamber has been fractionated, whether new magma is erupting from deeper in the Earth or if magma has been sitting around for a while at shallow levels.

If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let ‘em go, because man, they’re gone.

– Jack Handey