Amy Ryan

Amy Ryan was born in Berkeley, CA in 1988. She completed her B.A. at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO in 2010, studying lava flow morphology and rheology at Volcán de Colima in Colima, Mexico as a part of her senior thesis. In 2011 she began a one-year stint as a contractor at the Office of the Massachusetts State Geologist in Amherst, MA before moving to Vancouver, BC in August 2012 to start her MSc at the University of British Columbia with Dr. Kelly Russell.

Upon her arrival at UBC Amy began experimentally studying water solubility and bubble growth dynamics in silicate melts at atmospheric pressure. The presence of dissolved or exsolved water within a silicate melt can have important implications for volcanic systems, especially considering the effects of dissolved water and bubble fractions on viscosity and the fragmentation process. Amy’s work seeks to explore previously under-studied pressure regimes with the ultimate aim of thoroughly characterizing water solubility limits at a range of temperatures, quantifying bubble growth rates, and developing thermodynamic and kinetic models to describe these relationships at atmospheric pressure. Her work will be used to refine current solubility models and to explore how the temperature dependence of water solubility can change the physical properties of a cooling magma body at the surface.