Around 170,000 years ago, the Yellowstone Caldera — a supervolcano — produced a series of small eruptions in frequent pulses lasting roughly 100,000 years. Remnants from those eruptions can be found on the Earth’s surface today as volcanic rock. And those rocks contain critical clues about the interior of the supervolcano.

A fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America, geochemist Kari Cooper, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, won the American Geophysical Union’s Norman L. Bowen Award.