September 1998

Ro Kinzler travels to southwestern Washington state with a team of Museum coworkers to collect volcanic samples from Mount Rainier, the tallest volcano in the High Cascade Mountain Range. The team collected nine small columns of dacite that show what happened when lava erupted beside a glacier. Mount Rainier is covered with more ice than all other mountains in the contiguous United States combined, and as an active, explosive volcano poses an extreme volcanic eruption, landslide, and mudslide threat to the whole Seattle region, only 130 kilometers away.

Ro Kinzler and Graham Stewart carefully carry their chosen dacite columns down a steep slope of jumbled, broken, wet columns.

photo credit: Jackie Beckett, © American Museum of Natural History