Understand
The name Socorro is Spanish for "succor" or "aid," which is what 18th- and 19th-century looked for as they travelled south through the desert between Mexico and Santa Fe. During the late 19th century Socorro was the largest town in what is now New Mexico, as the result of an intense but short-lived mining boom. The bubble burst by the early 1900s, and today Socorro is a smallish town of about 9000 people, dominated by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (http://www.nmt.edu/) a legacy of its mining days and now a well-regarded technical college and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/).
Socorro is in a geologically interesting area, as its mining past might suggest. Scruffy mountains one decorated with a large "M" denoting the college, formerly the New Mexico School of Mines rise to the west, while the Rio Grande east of town flows through a major continental rift and has created a number of wetlands -- bosques -- that attract wildlife in this dry region. More ominously, a body of volcanic magma is intruding into near-surface crust not far north of town, creating an uplift that scientists at New Mexico Tech delight in studying. Even though the region has been the site of considerable volcanism in geologically recent times, not to worry; this uplift is not viewed as posing imminent volcanic hazard -- yet.
