But I am not a tourist. I am the unlikely, not-supposed-to-be-here, first woman to lead the eruption response team at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. I live in Hawaii National Park, in a bungalow, in a rainforest, on the 4000 ft summit of Kilauea volcano.

When I’m not trekking across lava, I study classical ballet in a century-old school house in Volcano Village, wander through the park’s tangle of tree ferns and ginger with my children, and, on the front porch late at night, sit beside my husband nursing dark stout.

Although I hold a PhD from the distinguished Johns Hopkins University, the degree is, in my mind, a Plan B achievement attained after the failed balletic attempt of my teens and early twenties. Ballet training is not often a springboard to a career in geoscience. But on a whim, after failure, and under pressure from a domineering older sister (who, although herself a dancer, held a passion for rock strata), I set out to become a geologist.

I was born and raised in the mid-Atlantic city of Rockville, so it may be that destiny played an early hand in my surprising pivot…