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Hello! I'm relatively new here, but I've been coming to this site for years to look at the great photos and read the discussions. I started this topic to share some of my own research that's going on right now about mass mortalities of marine invertebrates in Patagonia, Argentina. Over that past couple of years I've been working in Argentina, studying fossils (mostly decapods and mollusks) which were killed en masse by volcanic ash. We found some really interesting things in our first trip to the Valdes Peninsula, and documented that volcanic ash can have a killing effect on marine fauna even hundreds of kilometers away from the eruption! I'm also describing a new species of marine isopod that was found preserved in volcanic ash right now. This work is really exciting to me because there is a huge opportunity for new discovery. I hope to describe the numerous different effects volcanic ash has on marine ecosystems, and how they recover from catastrophic events. The ash also plays a really important role in fossil preservation processes, which I also hope to test and describe. I recently launched a "crowd funding" campaign on a website called experiment.com to help raise funds to go back to Argentina for a more comprehensive study of the mass kill sites we know about. If any of you are interested in learning more about the research, or donating to help support it, you can find a video, and other info at http://www.experiment.com/deathbyvolcanicash. I'm also interested in any comments or thoughts anyone has on this topic. I'm always looking for new field sites which may involve volcanic activity and marine fossils, and my research is also more broadly related to mass mortality events in the fossil record in general, so if anyone has any insight into any of this, please comment! Also, if anyone is in the Cleveland area, I'll be giving a talk to a local fossil club on Saturday, May 7th, so if anyone is interested, let me know!