With only a few days left before we leave for Chile, the team has been preparing for lift off!
Team leader Yves Moussallam cannot sit still for a moment, and has been off to Poas Volcano, Costa Rica, to learn classical direct gas sampling methods from the living legend Carlos Ramirez. He has also been learning how to analyse these samples for carbon isotopes and noble gases back at the laboratory of Scripps, San Diego.
In Sicily, Talfan has been working with our colleagues at Instituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) Palermo. Alessandro Aiuppa, Gaetano Giudice, Vincenzo Francofonte and Marcello Bitetto gave Talfan a three day masterclass in calibrating and operating the state of the art Multigas instrument and filter packs that we will use to measure the concentrations of volcanic gasses along the Andes.
In Indonesia, after training fellow team members on the UV and IR camera in Cambridge, Philipson has been training hard, climbing volcanoes every morning.
In Wellington (New Zealand) and Sydney (Australia), Ian has been calibrating and preparing analytical methodologies with the Thermo Fisher Delta Ray Spectrometer, and has been working with Ben King to finalize the design of a quadcopter-based Tedlar bag plume sampling apparatus. Ian has also spoken about the Trail By Fire on Radio New Zealand.