Susan Delap Heath

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I grew up in a little town on the New River in southwestern Virginia--a verdant paradise nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. Now I live in central New Mexico in a small city on the Rio Grande surrounded by sand, sagebrush, cactus, and the Rocky Mountains.

Pictured above is a rocky peak rising 2550 feet out of the ground--as seen from my backyard. This mountain is part of a collapsed caldera. Its official name is Socorro Peak (7243 ft above sea level), but the locals call it M Mountain--M for Mines--because the entire mountain is on the campus of the former New Mexico School of Mines, now named New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech for short). The M on the peak is man-made, and every year students from New Mexico Tech climb to the top carrying lime to "paint" the M.

Twelve miles below the surface of the city is a pool of magma that is slowly inflating, causing numerous microearthquakes. The local college has lots of seismometers set up all over the state, so you can check out the seismicity yourself in near real time. (This might help if you're mystified about what all those squiggles are.)