HIGP graduate student honored with AGU Outstanding Paper Award

Erin Fitch, graduate student in the Hawaii Institute for Geophysics and Planetology

HIGP graduate student Erin Fitch was honored with an Outstanding Student Paper Award for an invited oral presentation given at the 2016 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The presentation was titled, “The Mechanisms and Dynamics of High-Energy Lava–Water Explosions.”

Fitch’s research focuses on external water on volcanic processes using field methods, laboratory analysis, and numerical modeling. She is working with Dr. Sarah Fagents on several projects investigating the mechanisms and dynamics of explosive lava–water interactions in Iceland and Hawaii. They intend to use carefully constrained parameters derived from field-based data as inputs for energy modelling with the aim of applying these results to the study of explosive magma–water interactions.