Steve Cox graduated from University of Puget Sound in 1978 with a degree in Environmental Science, then went to work at Brown & Haley for two years.  He was then hired as a temporary employee by the USGS to help on the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, and contoured on at the Cascades Volcano Observatory for two years. During this time, he attended the UW as a Post-Bachelors non-matriculating student in Geology; he strengthened his geology expertise by taking all their Geology classes except Paleontology. In 1983, he joined the groundwater water quality section of the USGS’s Washington water science center in Tacoma.

In Feb. 2019, Steve discussed methods and results of “Dating groundwater in Puget Sound.”  (Updated Oct. 2021)

Megan Anderson is an earthquake geophysicist at the Washington Geological Survey.  Megan spent her early years in Kent, WA during which the eruption of Mt. St. Helens probably spurred her fascination with geology, which was her major at Carleton College in Minnesota.  She studied subduction processes and earthquakes in South America for her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona.  She has studied numerous tectonic regions of the world but has always made her way back to the Pacific Northwest because there is so much left to discover.  She taught for 10 years at Colorado College, dragging her students and equipment across the country to do research here every summer, but now (as of June) has made her home at the WGS in Olympia.

Her talk in Nov. 2018 was entitled “Revelations about active faulting in the Puget Sound region from geology and geophysics.”  (Updated Oct. 2021)

Christina is a geologist who spent most of her career working for the U.S. Geological Survey on active volcanoes.  Her first job with the USGS, however, was working on glaciers from an office in Tacoma.  When Mt. St. Helens erupted in May 1980, she quickly transferred to Vancouver, to what was soon to become the Cascades Volcano Observatory.  She worked there for the next four years while completing a Master’s degree at Western Washington University in Bellingham.  In 1984, she moved to the USGS’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on the Island of Hawai`i, where she monitored the 35-year-long eruption of Kilauea until retiring. Christina returned to the Northwest in 2012, settling in Sequim, where she spends her time hiking and snowshoeing in the Olympic Mountains and working on her photography.

Since returning to the Northwest, Christina has revisited Mt. St. Helens’ crater, hiking in as far as the terminus of the fast-growing glacier that has wrapped around dome. Her talk entitled Working in the crater of Mount St. Helens, 1980-83, will  include an update on current conditions at Mount St. Helens, nearly 40 years after the big eruption. (Updated Oct. 2021)