Harmonic Tremors

A Serpentine-Inspired Rant

2010-07-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

By this point, I don't think I need to actually outline the whole fiasco surrounding the motion to demote serpentine from its position as California's state rock. More prompt geobloggers than I have already outlined this idiocy - seriously, unless you're inhaling serpentine dust like it's oxygen, you're not going to run into an asbestos problem - and those posts (and the flurry of commentary from geotweeters) have reached the attention of national media.

The claim that serpentine is an "unhealthy" rock is ridiculous on its own, but you know what else strikes me as ridiculous about this whole issue? The fact that, suddenly, people are getting all freaked out by the mere idea that something about California's geology might be able to kill them.

Hold the phone! Stop the presses! California's geology may be hazardous to your health and wellbeing?!

This is a state sliced by a plate boundary, with the main fault and all of its subsidiary ones capable of city-destroying earthquakes. We're known for our earthquakes, are we not? This is a state where the configuration of mountains focuses, heats, and speeds up the wind like a huge bellows, and effectively creates corridors of fire. We're known for our fires, are we not? This is a state where steep slopes produce debris flows after storms or slump off after longer rains. We're known for our landslides, are we not? Not to mention the contours of the coastline that serve to magnify distant tsunamis in some cases, or the ski resorts that happen to be dormant volcanoes...

I would say those things can be pretty darn hazardous to your health. I suspect that plenty of people would agree with me: the residents of La Conchita, of Crescent City, or of Sylmar, the historians and current residents of San Francisco, those who visit and monitor Mammoth Mountain, just to name a few. I'd hazard a guess (rimshot) that these folks would find those geological threats far more pressing than some specific minerals that are one component in a rock that's more commonly found underground than in, oh, our lungs. And I suspect the other geologists pushing to keep serpentine as California's state rock would agree with me as well.

So, California's geology can be pretty darn unhealthy, for values of unhealthy ranging from "deadly due to fault surface rupture collapsing one's house on oneself" to "alive but breathing in lots of smoke." But California kind of represents us as Californians, doesn't it? Does that mean the next step is to demote California's entire landscape from representing the state?

That would be ridiculous. But isn't it, then, ridiculous to make a fuss about demoting a rock that is really only dangerous if someone throws it at you, or perhaps if you drive off a cliff with a serpentine outcrop at its base? (Because, in case you somehow missed the other blog entries, tweets, and news articles, serpentine isn't going to give you cancer!)

Aside from all that, the formation of serpentine is directly related to the forces that formed and shaped so much of California to begin with. As such, it's an excellent representative of the state. (And for any politician who knows the word "subduction" and is about to claim it's dangerous for causing quakes and volcanoes, the serpentine is a byproduct of that process, not a cause. If I wanted to be even snarkier than I already have been, I could argue that picking a rock that is dangerous might better represent California's potentially-hazardous landscape. Be glad serpentine is "just" a representative of how the land that became our state got here to begin with. Also, be glad that it's pretty. Can you find me a prettier rock that also represents California well?)

I think that's quite enough from me, at least for now. I'll leave with this note: why is state money getting spent on this issue at all? If California wants to spend money on reducing geologically-induced harm, that money would be better spent on things like seismic retrofits, zoning to avoid earthquake and landslide hazards, clearing brush between the urban-wildland interface to try and avoid fires spreading into neighborhoods, emergency response training for civilians, and general awareness and outreach.

MS

2010-06-18T17:45:00.001-07:00

Hello, Geoblogosphere!

I realize I should have posted a more formal hiatus in advance of all of this, but at the same time, I didn't realize I'd be quite this insanely busy.
Which is, I also realize, a ridiculous assumption, given that I was working on my Master's thesis this quarter.

That said, I am finished with it! I defended the thesis on Tuesday, to a surprisingly large audience given that it's technically summer break now. I made the minor revisions, and I officially filed the thesis with the graduate division this afternoon.

I am staying at the same school to do PhD work, and that work will be a direct offshoot of my MS work. In terms of the actual work, there's not a big cutoff or different direction, and I'm still really excited about the work I'm going to be doing next. Even with the direct continuation, there's a definite sense of accomplishment: that I wouldn't be continuing into this third (and fourth and fifth and...) year of work if I hadn't finished the Master's stuff first! So, here's to the last two years, and the next three!

The first big thing I'll be doing as a person who actually has a degree in earth science is going to a conference...in a castle in Slovakia. Seriously. It's a conference specifically on numerical modeling of earthquake dynamics, and my adviser and his other student are also attending. I will be giving a talk on my latest work. I will try to be less of a flake about blogging this than I have about the other conferences at which I gave talks.

After that, I'll be heading up to the Bay Area for July, August, and September to help with some laboratory experiments on fault friction at USGS. Needless to say, I'm beyond merely excited about this opportunity!

Another thing I really hope to do this summer is put up a series of posts on Things I Should Have Blogged About Months Ago. Because I'll be the first to say that I'm behind on this! Topics I plan on addressing are:
The trip to Hawai'i (This was in October of 2009, I am such a slacker.)
The rest of AGU (or, at least, how my talk went)
The Rise and Fall of Snow Los Angeles (purely silly, but to be blamed on a conversation at AGU)
The earthquake in Mexico, and going into the field immediately afterward!
Seismological Society of America conference in Portland
Visiting Mt. St. Helens

And I hope to be more on the ball about the Accretionary Wedge as well.

Accretionary Wedge #23: The Thing That Eats My Time

2010-03-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

Hello, world! I realize I've failed at the day-to-day writeup of AGU that I promised back in December (eep), but what better way to come back from an unannounced work-induced hiatus than to describe the work I've been doing, hm?

I don't think I've blogged much about the research I do. I know I post about about interesting places I visit, visible and tangible fault features, and outreach, but my actual research doesn't have a field component yet at all. I do work in earthquake dynamics - the physics of how faults rupture. My method so far has been numerical modeling, specifically with both 2d and 3d finite element codes. This method divides both sides of the fault into a grid of elements of a designated size, then applies equations of motion, stress transfer, and wave propagation to each element over each timestep, then sums up the result. Each model represents a single earthquake on a fault; aside from a forced nucleation point, the magnitude and intensity of the quake are determined by the model parameters. There are many existing codes that do this, and I've been working with two of the newer ones. I've also very recently started doing some multi-cycle quasi-dynamic models. These take a fault system and put it through multiple earthquake cycles, including interseismic application of tectonic stresses. What makes them quasi-dynamic is the ruptures work by way of stress state, and don't include dynamic wave propagation.

There are a lot of fault parameters you can tweak in dynamic models, and my work focuses on the effects of fault geometry on rupture behavior and ground motion. Models investigating other parameters might use a fault that's a straight line, but straight lines almost never happen in nature. Faults have branches, bends, discontinuities, and stepovers, and they've proven to be important factors in determining where earthquake rupture stops. There's one field study of mapped surface ruptures (Wesnousky, 2008) that shows that a significant number of surface ruptures die out near a geometrical discontinuity in the mapped fault trace. On the other hand, events like the 1992 Landers earthquake or the 2002 Denali earthquake show that rupture can traverse some considerable discontinuities between faults. Understanding how rupture behaves when it encounters a geometrical discontinuity is therefore very important in determining the hazard associated with individual faults or fault systems.

I already have one fault geometry paper (which also happens to be the first chapter of my Master's thesis) in review. It's a parameter study of whether or not rupture will propagate through a bend in a fault of a given length, with a given connecting angle. Unsurprisingly, steeper angles and longer bends are more likely to halt a rupture, but exactly how steep or long varies depending on whether the step is extensional or compressional (that is, whether the bent segment is pulled apart by the fault's direction of slip, or whether it's crunched together), on the overall size of the fault system, and on the orientation of the stress field acting on the fault. That third criterion is particularly important - in some orientation, dynamic effects control the rupture far more than static ones, but in others, static effects can overcome dynamic ones. I still haven't heard from any reviewers on this paper, but I'm sure I'll post here excitedly when it goes into press.

I'm working on a second paper now, determining how fault geometry affects the intensity and distribution of peak ground motion in an earthquake. In this case, I'm using fault systems that consist of two segments with no linking segment, meaning that rupture has to re-nucleate on the second segment as opposed to just traversing an unfavorable part. I'm looking at both compressional and extensional systems here, with a varied distance between the fault segments, a variety of stress drops, a variety of rupture velocities, and a variety of different rock types. So far, I'm finding that every single one of those parameters affects the pattern and intensity of motion. The talk I gave at AGU (which I will write about, really!) was about preliminary results of this work, and I'll be giving a talk at the Seismological Society of America meeting in Portland in April about the specifics of the material contrast cases.

So that's my research - as I transition into working on a PhD, I'll start investigating more complex geometries and looking at real fault systems, as opposed to hypothetical ones. All that while still taking a bunch of classes to catch up on my background!

AGU 2009, Day Three

2009-12-17T08:55:00.000-08:00

The entire afternoon on Wednesday was filled with talks directly related to the type of problems I look at and the type of modeling I do - a pretty sharp contrast with Tuesday! The morning, however, was fortunately open for such things as practicing my talk one more time for my adviser, and for meeting with SCEC's education and outreach team about "Faults of Calfornia."

The practice run went smoothly. I presented preliminary results of the same work at the SCEC meeting in September (and then I had to do all the models over because we switched finite element codes), and I did a couple of practices of the talk at UCR over the past few weeks. My biggest concern was timing, since my first practice clocked in at 13.5 minutes without questions, but my second practice went at Mach 1, taking only 9 minutes. Yesterday's practice was a clean 12 minutes, and I haven't had any more coffee than usual this morning, so my timing should remain spot-on.

The meeting with SCEC was also productive. Our main goal right now, since the illustrations on "Faults of California" are all done, is to figure out the best way to get it into schools. We don't want to just hand it to teachers without any structure, since that's not the best way to integrate into anyone's lesson plans. We came up with a few ideas; my holiday reading is likely going to involve reading some of the California Education Standards, and it looks like there will be some drives to USC in early 2010.

As some of you reading this surely already know (since I assume at least some of you were there), there was a planned lunch for geobloggers at AGU yesterday afternoon. I'd say there were about 25 of us in all. The first half was more informal conversation - it was nice, as with the Tweetup on Monday, to put faces to names and blogs. (And, in the case of those of you I'd met before, it was great to see you all again!) The second half of the lunch involved everyone getting up and introducing themselves and their blogs, then sharing their particular thoughts on the state of the geoblogosphere. I'll repeat a thought I had at the time: I think it's wonderful that so many of us started blogging because we just plain like discussing our field and research, and that this network of blogs has turned into a real and more formal way to exchange information and dialogue in the sciences.

I had to duck out of the blogger lunch a bit early because I didn't want to miss the set of talks on earthquake source modeling. Occasionally, I have a moment of worry that someone will scoop the particular things I want to research/model - because there can't be that many people modeling fault dynamics, right? - but sessions like this make me realize that I'm being dumb for worrying so much. There's a huge diversity of topics, methods, specific problems, and ways to interpret within the definition of "earthquake source modeling," and even in four hours of talks, there's still tons and tons more that hasn't been covered or done yet. One of the main themes in this session was the idea that multiple faults can be involved in a single earthquake. This has been known at least since the M7.3 Landers earthquake in 1992, which surface ruptured its way through parts of six faults, but many of yesterday's talks discussed the possibility of there being subsidiary faults in quakes not known to have involved more than one fault, or the possible contribution of smaller faults to a quake on a much larger one. With all these discussions, I feel like I've come into looking at the problem of fault geometries and interactions at just the right time, and that makes me all the more excited to keep on modeling things.

My talk is also a complex fault geometry talk, though in this case, I'm looking into geometrical effects on ground motion, rather than just on rupture behavior. It's this morning (Thursday, 17 December) at 11:05 AM in Moscone West room 2005. I hope to see some of you there!

AGU 2009, Day Two

2009-12-16T09:28:00.000-08:00

There are always a gajillion different things going on at AGU, to the point where it's overwhelming to consider all of it. When I considered the categories that are most likely to relate to my work (Seismology and Tectonophysics, also sometimes Union), Tuesday seemed to be the day that had the least subject matter related to my own work. That made it a logical day to catch up with people and discuss projects and research - not to mention, it was a good day to do my stint as the representative at the UCR booth in the exhibition hall.

The first thing I did was head over to the Southern California Earthquake Center booth to set up a time to discuss a project I've been working on with them. I know I've mentioned this project rather evasively thus far, and while I can't give lots and lots of details yet because it hasn't been released yet, I will say that it's an earthquake awareness comic book called "Faults of California." The illustrations were finished this summer, but we're working on a education module to go with it. We ended up deciding to meet about this on Wednesday, but I stuck around the booth to help set up. This involved a scene of several people jumping up and down while shaking a poster tube, trying to dislodge a bunch of plate tectonics educational posters. Brings new meaning to the idea of "ShakeOut"!

I did go to a late morning session on earthquake early warning systems. Most of them were variations on the theme of using P-wave amplitude to make a guess at eventual magnitude, though they all suggested different ways to implement this. One took the approach of tracking sudden motions by GPS and reporting them that way (though, from talking to people at UCR who work with GPS, I would think this would take a while to process?). Another aimed to estimate the direction and extent of the eventual rupture by looking at wave directivity. This one was particularly interesting to me in that I think it would benefit from some sort of prior including possible rupture paths for faults with complex geometry. I hadn't ever thought that the kind of models I do could help with early warning, but apparently they could! The early warning session also included a talk on the Quake-Catcher Network, which I've blogged about on here before. This network uses the accelerometers built into laptop computers as basic earthquake ground motion sensors, and sends the timing and shaking data to a central network for consideration. When I first installed the software in early 2008, QCN was still in alpha-test mode. It currently has expanded to over a thousand users across the globe. (And I'd encourage you all to check it out and add to the member count!)

I spent the entire afternoon at the UCR booth in the Academic Showcase part of the exhibit hall. Traffic was relatively slow to the booth (and it probably didn't help that we were between Yale and Virginia Tech), but there were a few prospective students who signed the mailing list. I also got a lot of questions more pertinent to the Environmental Sciences department (which is not the same as the Earth Sciences department at UCR), and a lot of inquiries about "Where is Riverside, anyway?" (when I answered that one, it was often followed by, "Wow, is it really hot?"). I assure you, visitors and questioners, that our department is worth another look. Being in the desert and 100+ degree heat does nothing to hinder the good work coming out of UCR.

AGU 2009, Day One

2009-12-15T08:37:00.000-08:00

So! I'm going to attempt what, given my past history with regular updating, may seem like a futile effort. That is, I'm going to try and blog every day of this year's American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting (in San Francisco, as usual) separately. This is just as much a way to not gloss over things as it is a way to try and practice general better blogging habits. This meeting has already stressed the importance of blogs for communication, and the possibilities of using Twitter both for spreading and collecting information about various geological/enviromental/hazard/etc. events. I've certainly been tweeting a lot lately, but my blog is now saying, "Don't leave me for that biiiird!" And so, daily entries for the conference. Yes.
(I'll also be dumping a day-by-day of the class trip to Kīlauea in here soon - possibly later today, if the UCR booth in the exhibitor hall has low traffic.)

The very first talk of the very first Tectonophysics section yesterday was one I really wanted to go to. It involved the formation of the San Andreas Fault, with comparisons to the transform boundary in New Zealand. Alarm clock failure (in that, it did not go off) prevented me from attending, but I was able to get going quickly enough that I made it in to the middle of the second talk of the session (about a possible shift of the North American-Pacific plate boundary to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada). The whole morning in the Tectonophysics group was devoted to continental transform boundaries, in fact. Most of these talks were focused on characterizing these boundaries, whether by classical mapping, looking at seismicity or paleoseismic data, or studying (very very shiny awesome) LiDAR images. There was a definite focus on geometry at several scales - map, or fault surface roughness, or shape of the damage zone. There was not, however, much talk of earthquake behavior on these systems, but thatʻs the divide between this group and the Seismology one, I suppose! I opted to listen to as many of the continental transform talks as I could, since my work is all about looking at rupture dynamics and ground motion on faults with geometrical complexities, and thereʻs a good chance that Iʻll be looking at the constraints on fault structure and geometry that researchers in the Tectonophysics group in constructing dynamic models sometime in the future.
(I was, however, slightly disappointed, that the Garlock talk basically led to the conclusion that "everyone still has completely different ideas of how much this thing is slipping." Ah well!)

After lunch (and after inflicting Hawaiʻi photos on a friend from Berkeley), I headed into the poster hall to get a look at as many more things about geometrically-complex strike-slip faults as I could. I got in some skimming before coming to a poster about segmentation and postseismic stress state in the Landers earthquake. I ended up getting into a great and detailed conversation with the poster-presenter, and before I knew it, it was time to go to another session.

The last session I went to was completely out of my area of more than scant knowledge, but at the same time, it was something that has interested me since I was ten years old. The session in question was a planetary science one, discussing this summerʻs Jupiter impact. The session was under embargo, so I wonʻt go into anything about what was actually said (other than the fact that Jupiter is apparently, quote, "insidious" about not showing features under certain filters), but it sent me back to that place of ten-year-old wonder when Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter in 1994. That impact entirely captivated me, to the point where I was making an attempt to understand NASA press releases, contacting discoverers of the comet by email (seriously), and making my parents take me to a Smithsonian press conference about the impact. Iʻm not really sure I know much more about comets now than I did at the peak of my astronomy obsession, and Iʻm sure I was more timid about asking questions yesterday than I would have been in 1995, but I still thoroughly enjoyed hearing everything that the presenters had to share about this new impact.

The evening was occupied by a meetup of Geonerds On Twitter at 21st Amendment on 2nd Street. I had no idea what to expect in terms of attendance or formality of discussion, but there was a huge turnout and a very fun casual air about the whole thing. It was absolutely great to put faces to the names Iʻve been interacting with online for so long, and it was just as awesome to get to have incredibly unabashedly nerdy conversations with people that didnʻt end up getting bored with said unabashed nerdiness. Topics included the difference between astrophysics and planetary geology, when the best time to visit the Mojave is, how close we all live to various active faults, fuzzy animals, beer, and the usefulness of Twitter and blogs in conveying geogeekery across the internet and world. Iʻm hoping thereʻll be events like this one at future conferences! (Or, if thereʻs another one in San Francisco not during a conference, it gives me another excuse to come up here again...)

Thereʻs a luncheon for geobloggers on Wednesday. How many of you will be there?

San Francisco, October 17th, 5:04 PM

2009-10-17T21:05:00.001-07:00

I drove across the Bay Bridge this morning, as did many other people. Many other people did the same at that time of morning twenty years ago today as well. It was a normal drive to them; they had no idea that they wouldn't be able to drive back the way they came for their evening commute. True, I couldn't say for sure that I knew I'd be able to drive back that way this year, but with the events of twenty years ago on my mind, I think I was more aware of the possibility that it could happen again at some point in the future, near or far. I suspect that other drivers on the Bridge were thinking about it more than they might have on any other day as well.

I can't know for certain, but I suspect that this anniversary was far more on the mind of the City at large than the 1906 anniversary was, for reasons of time and experience. Loma Prieta was, after all, a smaller earthquake that didn't completely destroy the City, but it was, in the grand scheme of things, recent, and it simultaneously highlighted what an overall smaller quake can still do to a modern city, and how everyday people can be absolutely heroic in their attempts to save lives and stave off more damage. It is still a shared experience among many people here (and even those who weren't here at the time surely know people who were), rather than a historic commemoration at which the few remaining survivors are revered as living monuments. It is still very much a living memory, a community disaster.

And the City formally approached it in a way that reached into communities, rather than as a ceremony to only draw out the devoted. Specifically, street fairs with a theme of earthquake/disaster awareness and preparedness happened in four areas of the City (Mission, Marina, Bayview, and Sunset), to be followed up by more informal block parties. This did not strike me as the most intuitive way to commemorate a disaster in which 63 people died, but I still volunteered to help out. After spending the day in the Marina handing out emergency preparedness activity workbooks and painting little kids' faces, though, I think I got the idea. Earthquakes effect the whole community, and the community does need to discuss them to figure out how to best survive individually and as a group. Treating quakes like the boogeyman, like something only to be talked about in a Very Serious Environment, isn't going to promote open discussion. The fair environment, initially jarring though it was, seemed to be an effective casual space to discuss personal experiences (I heard snippets of so many people's stories of what they were doing when the quake hit - and a guy from channel 4 news seemed outright disappointed when I told him I wasn't here at the time and thus didn't have my own story, since he figured I would've had an interesting little kid perspective on it), as well as a place where people could start actively building their emergency kits from items at the various booths. The fair was not a celebration of the earthquake, but of the ability of people to withstand it and resultantly know even better what to do in the event of the next one.

The fair was followed up by a more solemn ceremony, with a set of speakers including the chief of the San Francisco Fire Department, the Marina District Supervisor, and Mayor Gavin Newsom. The theme was remembering those who had died and praising those who did so much to save lives. The ceremony also served as a dedication of a new monument to the victims, survivors, and emergency workers of Loma Prieta. The monument itself consists of the brass nozzle from the fireboat Phoenix, which saved the Marina District by pumping baywater through portable hydrants. It isn't installed yet, but was placed atop its eventual location for today's events. Both the printed program and the speeches expressed the hope that the Marina Earthquake Monument will become a sort of "21st century Lotta's Fountain," echoing the post-1906 gathering place. Yearly October 17th ceremonies seem to be the plan, though I do have to wonder how successful they'll be. The 1906 ceremony evolved from the Fountain being a central meeting place. The Phoenix's nozzle was certainly central in 1989, but the gathering of crowds wasn't. I do hope that the annual meetings take off, however, and that they continue to be an environment in which people can openly discuss what they'll do when the next one hits, as they did today.

Some other things about today's ceremony echoed the 1906 ceremony I attended in April. Everyone sang again, the same song "San Francisco" as has been a staple at Lotta's Fountain for so long. I don't think I was surprised that the same song was used, though I did find it interesting that the same thing was used to touch the living memory earthquake as to the largely historical one. There was also a definite push to get things said before the minute of the quake, so that it could be set aside from the rest of the ceremony. But where the minute of 5:12 AM on April 18th echoed back to 1906 with silence, 5:04 PM on October 17th called Loma Prieta with noise. Mayor Newsom activated a fire siren mounted on the stage, and all the fire trucks collected around the Marina Green blasted their own sirens back. The fireboat Guardian spouted three high plumes of water back over the Bay, a display that served well as a visual representation of the sound. Once the blasting faded out, a bell that tolls whenever a firefighter is injured or killed was rung in a pattern that was at once quieter than the previous barrage of sirens, but more striking against its background noise level. It was as if the sirens were screaming, "This was our earthquake! We were hit hard, but it couldn't take us down, and what did go down came back! We are stronger than this disaster!" and then the bell added, "We still can't let it happen that way again."

As I walked back to my car after cleaning up the fair area, I went past the intersection of Beach and Divisidero, where the Marina fire started and hit hardest. The post-1989 buildings there are all solid and bright and without sign of past disasters. Behind them, the sunset backlit puffs and shreds of grayish cloud with shades of orange and red. It was a beautiful sunset, but in that context, I couldn't help but think it looked rather like a fire, fortunately constrained to the sky rather than touching the buildings below, but still reminding of a tangible past and a potential future.

Geosong: Liz Pappademas' "Loma Prieta"

2009-10-16T23:34:00.001-07:00

It's been a long time since I posted a geology-related song (even though my collection of them has been growing steadily), but I've been waiting for just the right moment to post this one. Seeing as tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the M6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, I think we've come upon the right time.

I found this song by typing "Loma Prieta" into the iTunes store, as I've had to get more and more specific (or obscure) to keep expanding my playlist. Two songs with the title popped up, and I downloaded both of them. This was the one I liked better, though; the other puts the quake into a relationships context, but this one seems like it must be describing an actual real experience.

I'd never heard of Liz Pappademas before, and I still don't know how well-known she is. Her website tells me that she was raised in San Francisco, but has moved around since and is currently a resident of Los Angeles. I think I could have gathered the first part just from the lyrics to the song. It opens with, "Loma Prieta, dark hill. Shook up the San Andreas to the heart of a little girl," and goes on to be an account of a very scary experience told through the eyes of a child who has some understanding of what's going on in a physical sense, but is having more trouble with the emotional side. She describes clinging to her mother in the doorway (nevermind that you shouldn't get in the doorway!), of school being canceled, of camping out in her parents' bedroom, of expecting aftershocks, and of feeling much older after the whole experience. There's also a stanza, a little more separated from what appears to be personal experience, that describes images of 1906 being recalled by the fires in 1989. I don't know how much a little kid would or wouldn't know about 1906 as a product of a San Francisco upbringing, but I do know the comparison is consistent with some of the news media about Loma Prieta. It's certainly a moving comparison in the context of the song.

In terms of the music, "Loma Prieta" is both simple and complex. It's simple in terms of its instrumentation - mostly just voice against a piano accompaniment consisting of elaboration upon broken chords, with a little bit of electronic stuff for color. The chord sequences are not, however, your typical I-IV-V-I of so many pop songs. I'd have to sit down and think about exactly where the chords go, but the specific progression is not the point - rather, it matters more that it takes a while to get to the resolution, and there are parts that don't get resolved. The melodic line is also very free, with phrases of unequal length and pacing. It also encompasses a wider range of pitches than many pop songs do; not lingering on a specific set of pitches adds to the somewhat freeform feeling of the song. In the way the melody is shaped (and perhaps also in the broken chord piano accompaniment), "Loma Prieta" seems to be toeing the line between pop song and art song.

I very much like this song, for its subject and for its music. I think that this free and sparse style of music fits the storytelling aspect of the lyrics, and I think that the lack of any attempt to paint the words with the music allows the severity of what the singer experienced to be come all the more stark and clear. The last verse also really gets me: "Loma Prieta, dark hill. Please stay dark, I pray, please stay still."

Please stay still. This is a very human thing to plead after disaster, but the plea is made to something that cannot and will not stop moving. That particular mountain may not be shaking all the time, but the forces underneath it keep grinding steadily away, and eventually, there will be another earthquake at Loma Prieta Peak. It's inevitable, and the music seems to know it, even if the lyrics pray for it to not be so - the final cadence never quite happens.

Liz Pappademas on Rhapsody. (You can listen to the song for free there.)

Southern California Earthquake Center meeting, 2009

2009-09-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

I live! And not only do I live, but I've had an intensely busy and extremely productive August and September, with a combination of conferences, personal travel, research, and many many hours of work (and hours of sleep lost) on an outreach project called "Faults of California." I'll post more extensively about that project once it's at the point where I can actually show it to you, but for those of you who follow me on Twitter, this is related to all of the stuff I've been posting about "talking faults" and "comic books."

Anyway! Last week was the annual Southern California Earthquake Center meeting in Palm Springs. Last year's SCEC meeting was my very first scientific conference ever, and even though I went before I'd had any graduate level earth science classes, I still came out of it with tons of ideas for things I wanted to research. This year, now that I've been taking seminars and doing research all year, was even better. I had a much better overall understanding of posters and talks, but even more important, I was much better able to really converse with the people stopping by my poster or the people whose posters I visited, rather than merely explaining what I did, or merely listening to their own explanations. So, in addition to giving me yet another huge load of ideas I'd love to research/model, this year's SCEC meeting also served as a good marker for what a year of work can do. I'm certainly not thinking of myself as "that hack with a music degree" as much as I used to!

A hopefully-brief day-to-day rundown of the meeting:

Saturday, 12 September
Arrived in Palm Springs by 9:30 AM, for the beginning of a workshop on dynamic weakening mechanisms at 10 AM. The research presented in this workshop consisted primarily of laboratory experiments on various types of rock and fault gouge, most of which used a rotary shear device, though with different sets of stresses and different effects being observed. The particular focus seemed to be on assorted flash heating effects, and also the possibility of gels being created from fluid and silica on faults. There seemed to be a little frictional heating between the differing presenters, who sometimes disagreed on each other's experimental setups or interpretation of results, but even with the debate, it was enlightening to see some of the experimental work that goes into the friction laws and fault behavior equations that are coded into the modeling software I use on a regular basis. Toward the end of the day, I slipped out to hear a friend's talk in a workshop on transient detection; his talk was quite clear and well-delivered, though the other two before it were far too caught up in a type of math I haven't yet learned to make any sense to me.

Sunday, 13 September
The second annual SCEC student field trip was to San Gorgonio Pass. This area is particularly intriguing to me because it's a total mess of fault geometry, with curves, bends, branches, and stepovers, with transitions from strike-slip to thrust and back again. This is the kind of crazy complexity I'd love to model at some point, and getting to actually walk all over it and see contact points and evidence of the collision of the Mt. San Jacinto block with the San Bernardino Mountains brought the details of this unusual area far more into light than only reading about them would have. The field trip focused on features associated with these transitions in fault behavior: we looked at strike-slip features like shutter ridges in alluvial fans near Garnet Hill and an incredibly clear juxtaposition of schist and sediment in Whitewater Canyon (where I'd helped install a seismic array last October - guess my back was to this contact point the whole time then!), but only a few kilometers to the northwest, there were 12-meter thrust fault scarps. The last stop was the southern terminus of the clearly-mapped continuous San Andreas Fault. North of there, the Fault can be followed clear through to Point Arena, but the whole San Gorgonio knot to the south still hasn't been unraveled. Seeing these features and talking with the trip leaders gave me a ton of ideas for specific questions to ask and points to finetune in future modeling, and fortunately, the trip leaders said I could continue to pick their brains on this matter as I get into modeling specific faults. After the trip, I hung my poster, and also helped set up the "Faults of California" display in the hallway. It was very odd to have my artwork taking up a whole hallway, though I didn't stand next to it. I put a sign next to it directing people to find me at my research poster - a way to get people to talk to me about both!

Monday, 14 September
The meeting proper started on the 14th. Unlike last year, which separated out organizational discussions for different branches of SCEC, this year had a scientific talk followed by an organization-wide planning session at least tangentially related to the topic of the talk. Monday's talks concerned tremor on the San Andreas at Parkfield (and how it connects to repeating microearthquakes), and how earthquake scientists and engineers can better communicate with each other about their work and needs. I don't remember as much about the objectives discussions on this day as on Tuesday; I admittedly paid a little less attention since they were related to the parts of SCEC less related to my own work, and thus were issues about which I had no particular opinion. I hope - and suspect - that I'll be able to get more and more out of these more distant topics with each consecutive SCEC meeting. The thing I got the most out of on Monday was the poster session; my poster was about the effect of fault stepovers on ground motion, and it was therefore filed with the ground motion group as opposed to the rupture mechanics group. I ended up having a huge amount of traffic and discussion around my poster for both the afternoon and evening session, to the point where I didn't even get a chance to look at any of the other posters. A good problem to have, particularly considering how many ideas for things to look at within the scope of this project I got out of it!

Tuesday, 15 September
Tuesday's plenary talks were another take on dynamic weakening mechanisms (which included video of one rock sample exploding on the shear apparatus), whether or not the Gutenberg-Richter relation actually applies to faults, and a look at the southern California crust with seismic tomography. Of these, the Gutenberg-Richter one prompted the most discussion, in the form of a very heated debate that cut into planning time and continued to crop up in discussion for the rest of the whole conference. It was not enough to entirely deflect the discussion of what modelers and field geologists can do for each other, however. This planning session included the request for more detailed maps of fault geometry (yay!), with the possibility of a community fault mesh that anyone could adapt to their models without having to remesh anything. I certainly hope that these things come to pass, since limited understanding of geometry and the problems of meshing the complexity we do know about put some definite limits on modeling. The rupture dynamics posters were up in the Tuesday session, but once again, I was kept from getting to see very many of them because I was held up at my own work. I didn't plan to hover near the "Faults of California" printout in the hallway, but people dropped by to ask things, and before I knew it, the afternoon session was over. In the evening, I got to walk around the other posters for a few minutes, but then I had a meeting with the guy in charge of education at SCEC to discuss specific things to be done with "Faults of California." It was a very productive talk, even though I missed so many posters. Good thing there are abstracts in the conference program booklet...

Wednesday, 16 September
There was only one plenary talk on Wednesday, and it had to do with earthquake forecasting (but not earthquake prediction). It was an interesting talk, but the planning session afterward was even more interesting to me. I forget the prompt exactly, but it got onto the matter of fault systems and geometry, and there seems to be general agreement that the next phase of SCEC should include an objective for major focus on interactions between faults. There was specific mention of the San Andreas/Garlock intersection, which is of particular interest to me. I'll be pretty far into my PhD work by the time SCEC4 actually starts (2012), but if that work is in an area that's one of the main objectives, that will hopefully mean good things in terms of postdocs or jobs in the future.

I guess I failed at being brief (I guess I had to unload a lot of words after sitting there silently for two months!), but I reiterate that it was an awesome conference overall, and I have a lot more to think about and do over this year and the next few thanks to it.

(And I will hopefully be able to post more about "Faults of California" soon. In the meantime, now that the bulk of work on it is done, I should be posting here more in general. I hope.)

NMCDEF 2009

2009-07-27T16:03:00.001-07:00

As evidenced by the vague conference-y posts on my Twitter account a few weeks ago, I was indeed at a conference from 22-26 June: the Numerical Modeling of Crustal Deformation and Earthquake Faulting workshop, in Golden, Colorado.
(I started writing this up right away, and then my computer crapped out. It took me this long to feel motivated to rewrite the post. Oy.)

This is a small conference (they capped participation at 60 people), and is just as oriented around collaboration on modeling problems using Computational Infrastructure for Geophysics software as it is around science talks. (It was not poster-oriented at all, though a bunch of us did bring posters. They were taped on the walls around the conference room, but not many people seemed to look at them; they instead used poster session time for software tinkering.) There were people with a wide range of specialties in attendance, from people focused specifically on earthquake physics to engineers working in plasticity to mathematicians who had only recently started delving into earth science applications, not to mention all the code-focused people. Among the people I spoke with, it seemed like I was one of the few there who were working specifically on rupture dynamics, which was an interesting change from the groups of people I spoke most with at SCEC and AGU.

I admittedly felt pretty out of place for the code-focused parts of the workshop, which filled the afternoons of the first four days, and the entirety of the fifth day (though I spent much of the fifth day doing airport things instead). Though I have been running lots of fault models over the course of the past year, they have all been with only one mesher and one finite element code, both of which were written from the ground up by a former student of my advisor's. It's a very good code for what I'm doing, and part of the reason we've been using it exclusively is to get it out there more. But I have no experience using other code yet, nor in more than the slightest tweaking of the code we have. My only codewriting experience was a C++ class that I took in 1999 (I'll be taking more in the future, though). As a result, all the nuts and bolts coder discussion went right over my head and made me doubt myself about being at the conference at all. I did want to participate in the tutorials for the code more actively, though, even if none of the things presented actually included friction and dynamic rupture at the time being. (I understand these will be included in future versions.) At this point, I ran into the problem that neither mesher would work on my laptop, nor would one of the physics codes. Turns out that I needed to be running Leopard, and I was still on Tiger, so I had to look on at other people's progress instead of poking around on my own. (I decided to upgrade to Leopard when I got back to Riverside, and as luck would have it, I got a bad disk. This ended in me having to wipe my hard drive and install from a different copy.)

But for all the code stuff left me feeling like the newbie that I am, the science talks totally made up for it. In general, it was very useful to see how many other ways people are using finite element models to examine earthquakes and crustal deformation, since I was taught about them specifically in the context of rupture mechanics. One that was particularly exciting to me involved a different fault setup in terms of type and geometry, but ultimately a similar sort of stress barrier condition to the models I've been running all year. The shape of the curves delineating whether or not the rupture propagated through the barrier for a given stress case was very similar to the shape of the curve I found for whether or not rupture propagates through a given type of stepover. (Not going to say more about that, though, since neither paper is in press yet!) I was also particularly intrigued by a talk involving geologically-derived information on interactions between the San Andreas, Garlock, and Eastern California Shear Zone; this is the kind of material I'm already reading up on in anticipation of what I'll be doing after the Master's stuff. In addition to these, there were several talks on subduction, several on effects of plasticity, one on the East African Rift, one on Mt. Redoubt, one on compliant zones around Mojave faults, and a couple more specific to small-scale rock mechanics. Definitely a good eye-opening representation of what people are modeling beyond the coseismic part of the earthquake cycle!

So, on the whole, a good conference, even for the stress of not being a codehead. I'm hoping that, if the department thinks I should go again next year, I'll also have more experience with code-specific matters. Even if I'm not actually messing with the code, I should at least have experience with several more programs by then, and I know I'll be able to run their code now that I've upgraded my OS.

Time Warp: Destination 1906

2009-06-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

Lockwood had to poke me that the Accretionary Wedge is stumbling back to its feet, but it was good timing for a poke, since the quarter has just ended, and I might actually have time to write things other than comments on the undergrad papers I've been grading. (More on my insane past quarter later.) Anyway, I was initially concerned that I wouldn't be able to think of a topic and come up with an even vaguely eloquent post by the end of the grace period for late entries.
And then I saw the actual topic. No need to brainstorm here! I'm sure that every single one of you who has followed my blog, sparse though it's been lately, knows where and when I'd take my time machine. My choice definitely does not, however, come from any sort of desire to watch the destruction of a major city and the combustion of thousands of lives within. The decision to set the time machine for San Francisco in April of 1906 comes from an intense interest in earthquakes as events and processes, a great love for the city in question, and a fascination with the development of the field of earthquake physics itself.

I'll admit right out that I am curious what it feels like to be in a M7.8 earthquake. So far, my personal experience maxes out at M5.4, which was entirely exciting and not at all terrifying in my book. I suspect M7.8 would be well past the boundary between excitement and fear, but I suppose I wouldn't be afraid of the idea of that fear if I were gearing up my time machine to experience it. Furthermore, the bigger quakes are the ones that get the most intensive study, and while my own models are currently producing things that, according to the length of the faults, might not top the mid-6 range, I'll eventually be dealing in 7-pointers, and I want to know what one is like. For this curiosity, a time machine is a preferable option to waiting for a real one, both because it eliminates the waiting to begin with, and also because it means we wouldn't need a new 7.8 to appease any seismologist who might have this same curiosity. Of course, there's bound to be another one sooner than later, geologically-speaking, but the longer we put the new one off, the more we come to know about the processes behind it, and the more we can prepare our cities and citizens. The old quake already did its damage, horrendous though it was.
And that brings me to another point - I would not want to be in San Francisco proper to experience this earthquake. Even if my time machine were to make me impervious to flying bricks and walls of flame, I'd still want to be waiting somewhere where I could see the fault rip its way down the peninsula. I once read an account of a woman in Idaho who watched a fault rip through her property. She described it as if the fault scarp were being painted across the landscape by a very fast brush. That definitely seems like some sort of juncture between fear and awe, and that is absolutely something I'd want to see. My odds of merely experiencing a non-anachronistic 7.8 are much higher than of me watching the fault break in the process of creating that 7.8. Once the rupture passed me by, however, I think I would want to get back to the City as fast as possible, to see what damage the earthquake alone did before the fires took over...and then I'd want to get back to safer ground quite quickly as well, to avoid being caught by the flames.

But I could see a surface rupture for so many other earthquakes. Why turn my time machine toward this one? That, I'll admit, comes from my feeling extremely attached to San Francisco - never mind that I've never lived there! In making my plans to jaunt back 103 years, I'd build in a little extra time before April 18th - maybe I'd show up at the beginning of the month - so that I could explore the old San Francisco before it got wiped off the map. There are plenty of words about it, but in describing the before and after case, whose prose wouldn't be biased by what they'd just gone through? And, of course, who would have known to take before photos, if they had no reason to expect an after? The 1906 earthquake might have been the first extensively photographed natural disaster, but pre-quake images are hard to come by. I'd want to spend time just wandering the place, as I explore places when I visit them now, getting to know the streets and buildings and characters as they were before their disruption. If I were allowed modern technology aside from my time machine, I might try to snap some photos. If not, I'd plan to blow through a sketchbook or two. I might also be tempted to try and get a seat (or, more likely, a place to stand in the gallery) at the infamous Metropolitan Opera showing of Bizet's Carmen on the evening of April 17th, both because of the infamy of the event, but also because I am still a music geek, switch of majors or not! I've never seen Carmen live, and were I to have the opportunity to see Caruso in it, well, that's an excitement I'd share with many of those 1906 San Franciscans. It might even be a strange way to lose track of my hindsight for a few hours - just so long as I was sure to get it back in time to get out to the fault trace!

When I say that I'd want to get out of danger in the City once the fire started, though, I do not mean I wish to zap myself immediately back to 2009. I would be willing to handle the discomfort of the survivor camps for the sake of historical and cultural understanding, but also as a way to wait for the less ominous aftermath. Before the 1906 earthquake, so very little was known about faults and how they work, and the still-nameless San Andreas Fault was thought to be a small discontinuity in rock type not extending beyond part of San Mateo County. I would love to get myself an in with the scientific community of the day and watch the progression from knowing nothing of the earthquake source to "do the earthquakes cause the faults, or do the faults cause the earthquakes?" to the oh-so-fundamental elastic rebound theory. I would be so excited to watch the faults of California get drawn in on the map for the first time, outlining mountain ranges, bounding geologic provinces, highlighting the network of hazard that we still strive to understand and mitigate today. And to be able to witness that while also observing the rebuilding of San Francisco...Definitely a time of wonder and excitement, even though it came out of tragedy.

I suppose that all means I'd be staying until 1910. A bit of an extended trip, in terms of humanity, but not even a blink in geologic time. And since a time machine could be set to return to the exact time and place from whence it came, it wouldn't even be a blink at all to the current world that includes my timeline. It might mean four years off from my research, but I'd come back from it with a closer connection to where what I'm doing comes from, both in terms of scientific roots and in terms of seeing first hand what these natural processes we study can do.

Seismology By Text Message

2009-05-23T12:45:00.000-07:00

Now here's something I would have shoved everything else out of the agenda to post - had my internet not been down all week. It is so great having it back, let me tell you!

Anyway. I have a well-deserved reputation among my friends for being the geekiest of the geeky when it comes to earthquakes. As a result, a lot of my friends send me text messages whenever they feel a shake - even if it turns out to be a false alarm. After the quake in San Bernardino this January, I received messages from five different people within the first two minutes.

Some of those five people were out of town this past Sunday, but I still got two texts immediately following the M4.7 on the Newport-Inglewood Fault. I did feel the quake quite distinctly here in Riverside (it right after the conclusion of an orchestral and choral concert in which I'd played - if it had been five minutes sooner, it would have been a very interesting climax to the piece!); it started fairly sharply but was mostly rolling after that. It lasted long enough that I figured it was of a decent size but not particularly close.

The first text message came from a friend in Burbank. It came so soon after the shaking had stopped in Riverside that I immediately knew the source had to be closer to there than to here, since even the most intrepid of texters can't go that fast on tiny cell phone buttons. Within a minute, I got another message from a friend who lives down the street from me in Riverside. Both of them asked me whether or not I felt it, and how big it was. I told them I didn't know how big yet (and didn't find out until over an hour later, due to my stupid internet being down), but that I at least had some travel time information!

I also felt the M4.0 aftershock on Tuesday. It came during the midterm for the class I'm TAing, and while the urge was great to shout, "Did you feel that?" to an audience of several hundred, I didn't want to be a bad proctor and disrupt any test taking. When polled after everything was handed in, about half the class said they felt a wiggle. When I encouraged my discussion sections two days later to fill out the Did You Feel It? questionnaire, one student asked if the quake is why I'd practically skipped down the aisle of the lecture hall to talk excitedly with the professor. D'oh!

As I said, I have a reputation.

A day of kinematic GPS

2009-05-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

I really don't mean to be neglecting my blog (or neglecting commenting on your blogs) as much as I have been lately. It's mostly that, after the classes and the rehearsals and the homework and the grading, I put aside the papers and think only of sleep, rather than of spending more time at a screen writing things. I'm accumulating a rather lengthy To-Blog list, which, following Maria's lead> I think I'll have to make a summer break resolution (since New Year's is way too far off) to actually write up.

Anyway, though much of my time this quarter has been spent at a desk, the seminar I'm taking on tectonic geomorphology and quaternary field methods has served well to get me out and about. Many of our "trips" have been into the hills behind campus, mostly for funding reasons, but we have had a few larger outings. The most intensive one so far was when we went to Grass Valley in the San Bernardino Mountains to make a digital elevation map using kinematic GPS. (There was also a USGS/Caltech team out there using LiDAR to image some precariously balanced rocks, but we did not get to actively participate in this part of the work; we were mere observers.)

Grass Valley is located in the San Bernardino Mountains, not far from Lake Arrowhead. It falls into the region of highest possible threat of major earthquake ground motion in the state, due to its proximity to several major faults. The San Andreas Fault is 11 kilometers away, with several well-constrained paleoseismic sites within 20 km. The San Jacinto Fault is only a kilometer or two further away than the San Andreas; the north frontal thrust of the San Bernardino Mountains is about the same distance away to the north. The Cleghorn Fault runs directly through Grass Valley, though its activity isn't as well constrained; there's no current microseismicity, and no evidence of Holocene rupture.

The precariously balanced rock team was clearly there to try and constrain whether or not the worst case scenario of shaking according to the state hazard report had actually ever happened since those rocks became precarious to begin with. The focus of the class exercise, however, was more on a catchment containing a small system of drainages in the process of being captured by the Mojave River. Our goal was to use kinematic GPS to get a good picture of the area, which could then be used to better situate the precariously balanced rocks in the middle of the site.

Kinematic GPS is a method of relative measurement. Actual latitude/longitude figures don't come into play. All measurements are taken relative to a base station that gets set up somewhere central in the site, for the express purpose of kinematic GPS measurement. People then carry portable GPS antennae, either attached to a backpack or on a long pole, all over the area surrounding the base station. The goal is to go back and forth over all of the bumps and dips in topography - even though that does, of course, make for harder hiking at times - to make sure they show up in the DEM. The data has to be corrected for height of the person carrying the antenna (I was not, shockingly, the shortest one!) and for roughness of gait, but the corrections that need to be made can be gauged by having all of the antenna-carryers walk the same path before going their separate ways.

We spent a full afternoon tromping around the catchment, and the four of us managed to cross paths only a couple of times, hopefully implying that we didn't all cover the same ground. In my run-in with one of the professors, I was detailed to walk around the far edge of the site that hadn't yet been covered. I did so, but then I proceeded to overshoot the other edge of the site and get quite confused. I continued to walk through all of the (mostly-dry) drainages I could find for a while, but I started to get worried when I wasn't catching sight of the base station or the precariously balanced rocks. I definitely realized the irony of not having a clue where I was, despite having a GPS antenna strapped to my back, but dark humor wasn't going to get me out of the situation on its own. I did manage to work my way back to the road, then proceeded to go the wrong way on it for about half a mile before I noticed that I was wrong. It turns out I'd found the road only about 200 yards shy of the turnoff that lead straight to the base station. Ah well!

I haven't seen our DEM yet, though I'm told we covered a lot of ground, and I'm told that there was one antenna that went quite a bit further away than all the others did. One of the people in the class is doing all the processing as his final project for said class, so I may ask him if I can show off the results of our day in the field.

San Francisco, April 18th, 5:12 AM

2009-04-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

I got up at 4:30 all on my own this morning. I wanted to be up that early, because I wanted to be in a particular place exactly 42 minutes later. I am not normally a morning person, but it was surprisingly easy this time, because I was so excited about the whole thing. I had to admit that I was amused, though, that I was so very awake, in stark contrast with the people 103 years ago who were enjoying their last 42 minutes of sound unaware sleep.

Lotta's Fountain stands on a small traffic island in the middle of the intersection of Market, Kearny, and Geary. It's been there since 1875, a solid metal object impervious to what was thrown at it 31 years after its placement. As it was a prominent and resilient landmark at the time, people met there to keep track of each other through all the smoke and dust, and they continued to meet there in the following years to remember that morning when everything was so uncertain and nonsensical and terrible. As time went by and the proportion of survivors to their later-generation descendants skewed toward the latter, the meeting became more of an outright ceremony, a celebration of the City itself as a reborn entity just as much as a celebration of its people. I've written about this ceremony in several different stories and contexts, but this year, given that today is April 18th is Saturday, I jumped at the chance to actually be here for it.

Market Street was almost entirely empty at 5 AM, save for the knot of people surrounding the Fountain. There were easily over a hundred of us, possibly as many as two hundred. I was definitely one of the youngest people there, aside from some little kids that accompanied their parents, but on the whole, it was a very diverse crowd. Some seemed to be treating the whole affair very solemnly, apparently focused on the death and destruction that beset the City. Others took more of a festival approach, with flags and whistles and the letters SF emblazoned on pretty much every article of clothing they were wearing. Others still seemed to be largely there in support of the fire department. There was a small but particularly visible contingent of people dressed in period costume, pulling the predawn gathering into the realm of living history now that the event itself is so close to passing from genuine living memory into purely written and photographic records or secondhand accounts. And, this being San Francisco, there were a few particularly colorful characters that seemed to have no connection to the ceremony itself, but were taking the chance for an audience at which to praise Obama, support peace, denounce Proposition 8, and generally garner smiles in reaction. Regardless of the undoubtedly disparate reasons for everyone's interest in attending, it was exciting to see that this many people still care enough about what happened to drag themselves out of bed in the pitch black and collectively remember.

The ceremony proper began with a local senator, the chief of the fire department, the event organizers, and various other fire officials and VIPs of some sort pulling up in an old (though I don't think 103-old) red fire engine. They were followed by a huge shiny black car containing two of the remaining survivors, ages 107 and 105. The survivors were, apparently, interviewed, but I don't think they had a microphone, and I unfortunately couldn't hear a word they said. I'd hoped that I could get a chance to talk to them, but that didn't end up happening. I would have asked, "How do you think the City's view and treatment of these events has changed over the past 103 years?" Judging by the fact that a couple of other survivors died in the past year, this is a question I - or anyone else - might not get another chance to ask.

All the talk stopped at 5:12 AM. There was supposed to be a minute of silence, and that was so important that a few people in the crowd actually shouted at the senator that it was 5:11 and he had to stop talking in a few seconds. And there was actual silence, though not for the full minute; much of it was filled with bagpipes. While I appreciate the use of the instrument in solemn occasions, I would have preferred the actual silence, a long minute of expected lack of obvious noise from anywhere in the streets of such a normally-busy city, a distinct contrast from the minute of rumbling and cracking and growling we were commemorating.

After the silence, there were a few brief words from the senator, the fire chief, author James D'Alessandro, and the event organizer. They spoke of how wonderful it was that so many of us had gathered, how great a City this is to survive so much and come out so strong, how being prepared for the repeat is key to continuing to live here. The actual description of the events went unsaid, however; it didn't need to be described, since we all knew what it was that brought us all out there.

And then we sang. Or some of us did -- I felt awkward in the fact that I did not know the words and thus could not participate. The song in question is called simply "San Francisco," and comes from the 1930s movie of the same name. I didn't know the melody either, but the nondeliberate polytonality of the crowd's singing was still obvious to me. It didn't bother me; the lack of being in a single key didn't matter at all. Those who were singing sounded like they meant it enough to make up for those of us who were keeping quiet, and that sentiment meant far more than the actual music did.

In the end, a wreath was laid on the Fountain, the VIPs returned to their respective vehicles, and they took off in a motorcade of blazing sirens, met with claps and cheers. They did a lap around the block and then disappeared down Market, leaving the crowd to disperse. Some did so immediately, but others lingered longer. I remained there until about 6:30, engaged in conversation about Enrico Caruso, spaghetti western operas, which buildings remain that show signs of damage, what kind of geological mechanisms are responsible and how we understand them so much better now, even though there's still so much we don't know.

The light was right at 6:12 AM. There was no daylight savings time 103 years ago, so their 5:12 was an hour ahead of ours. As I'd read in so many period descriptions of that day, the light was the slightly greeny blue of dawn, with a narrow strip of warm yellow silhouetting the Ferry Building. That was, in a sense, the lightest it got on April 18th 1906; the rest of the day was engulfed in flame and smoke enough to obscure all sense of time of day. April 18th 2009 has been gorgeous and cloudless.

Airliner Chronicles: LAX to SFO

2009-04-17T22:27:00.000-07:00

I flew Virgin America from LAX to SFO today. I mention the airline specifically because I know for a fact that their particular air routes make for an awesome view out the window. (Also, their airplanes have wireless internet on them. Seriously. How cool is that?) But yes, if you are someone who likes landforms and faults and have to make this flight on that airline, I urge you to make the strongest effort possible to get a window seat on the right side of the plane. The view kept me far more entertained than the novelty of airborne WiFi ever could.

The first few minutes of the flight clung to the coast, but we swung back inland and caught up with the San Andreas Fault around the Big Bend. From there, we flew over...

The Carrizo Plain:

Cholame Valley (Parkfield's in there somewhere - just too small to see from that high up!):

Pinnacles National Monument (the exposed rock in the upper middle of the picture, with the city of Soledad in the foreground):

Loma Prieta (though I'm not entirely sure which of these peaks it is):

San Andreas in San Mateo (or possibly northern Santa Cruz) County (I think this is my favorite of the pictures):

I was definitely pretty giddy with excitement over the whole view by the time we landed at SFO. I suspect the way back to LAX will be just as awesome, if not more so, since I'll be flying in the middle of the day rather than at 6 PM. I managed to snag a window seat on the left side of the plane for that flight.

Geosong: Demolition Hammer's "Pyroclastic Annihilation"

2009-03-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

In honor of last night's eruption of Mt. Redoubt - and its glorious timing with regards to someone called the governor of Louisiana's remark about volcanoes - I give you a death metal song about explosive volcanism.

Now, I'm not a death metal fan. It isn't even particularly on my listening radar, and tuneless screaming does not do much for me aesthetically. I do, however, think that if there is any situation in which this sort of musical treatment would be apt, the explosion of a mountain would be a good candidate. I also have to admit that I adore the title of this one. "Pyroclastic Annihilation," seriously, is a winner of a title.

My knowledge of the band that performs this song, Demolition Hammer, comes entirely from Wikipedia. They were a death/thrash metal band from the Bronx, active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They disbanded around 1994 and are, from what I gather as an outsider to the genre, pretty obscure now.

The lyrics to "Pyroclastic Annihilation" have no sense of narrative or particular sentence structure of which to speak. It simply consists of various volcano-related terms and processes strung together in random order. The album this song comes from was produced in 1992, which was well before rampant Googling of things was prevalent, so I imagine the band must have trawled through some actual volcanology textbooks or articles to derive these lyrics. Most of the terms in there actually make sense, though there's a few that make me wonder what source they were actually looking at. Would anyone care to define "subrelluric forces" for me - a creative made-up definition definitely works, since I'm not finding anything real! Also, "intrusive tuff," guys? Yes, the random trawling for large and menacing phrases in a volcano book without any sense of meaning seems to have been the modus operandi here...

But still. A death metal song about explosive volcanism. For its flaws in lyrics, I still adore the concept. And it's actually screamed clearly enough that I can understand those lyrics without having to consult any external source. That's definitely worth something! And it also shows that even '90s death metal bands care about volcano monitoring.

Hear the song on YouTube (no video, though)
Lyrics

Oh crap, have I really not updated in almost a month? I had some really good excuses this month, at least, though they were stressful/depressing ones. It's spring break now. I have lots of things I actually want to write about, and will probably spew them out in the next few weeks.

...and then two more.

2009-02-25T08:39:00.000-08:00

I was tempted, in light of specific sentences said by a particular politician yesterday, to forgo my planned Accretionary Wedge post and instead write about how every geologist, at some point in his or her life, should engage in a little volcano monitoring. I totally stand by my statement (and will be taking a class next quarter that absolutely involves volcano monitoring), but I also recall that we're collectively trying to come with 100 things, and there is certainly enough room in the budget of geological curiosity/exploration for me to write about those things in addition to snarking about things that other members of the geoblogosphere have already addressed so eloquently.

And now, the post I was planning to write before this madness went down.

The original 100 Places Meme lists the San Andreas Fault as a Must-See. I absolutely agree with this, but as I was marking the text on the list in bold, I got to thinking about how those three words mean a whole slew of very different places, spread out over hundreds of miles. The ultimate San Andreas experience is, of course, to drive the whole thing (or, well, the parts that are on land). I can't check off the full 800 miles yet, but I've been from the southern end of the Fault at the Salton Sea up through Point Reyes, mostly on roads that cling pretty close to the surface trace. I definitely recommend this drive as a means to check off the San Andreas on the original meme, but I also feel like there are several specific must-see sites along its trace (and within its system of associate faults) that deserve space on the expanded list.

The first place that came to mind, without me even having to really think about it, is Carrizo Plain National Monument, in rural San Luis Obispo County. The quintessential image of the San Andreas, the one that pops up in all sorts of textbooks and popular science books about earthquakes, the first photo that turns up when one does a google image search for the San Andreas, is from the Carrizo. It's an aerial photo of the Elkhorn Scarp, also known as the Dragon's Backbone, a 17-mile-long pressure ridge that, from above, looks like a gaping chasm into the depths of the Earth. (The original Superman movie actually does use the scarp as Supes' entry point into the fault...) It is a spectacular photo, but the view from the ground is equally breathtaking, and has the added bonus of debunking the faults-as-gaping-chasms myth.
The Carrizo Plain is one of the best places to see a wide variety of features associated with continental strike-slip faults. In addition to the outstanding pressure ridge, there is the famous Wallace Creek. This streambed crosses the San Andreas, but not without getting pulled around a bit first. Wallace Creek takes a sharp right angle turn as it meets the Fault, then parallels it for some 130 feet before heading back on its course. This shows the displacement power that the San Andreas has, and is all the more staggering when taking into account that some people think a good percentage of that displacement came from the 1857 earthquake alone. There are plenty of other offset streambeds that are less dramatic, as well as some channels that have been "beheaded" by the fault. The Carrizo also boasts more typical scarps, some spots of more trenchlike fault expression, stepovers with traceable surface expression, and a few (mostly dry) sag ponds.

If faults aren't really your thing, the Carrizo Plain is still worth a visit. The northernmost part of the Plain contains Soda Lake, a huge alkaline lake out of which many spectacular mineral samples (some of which are in the Visitor's Center, which is not open all the time) have been extracted from not very deep. The Carrizo is also thought to be an example of what the native Californian landscape might have looked like before the Europeans did anything to it - fields dominated by wildflowers and scrubby plants. For this reason, late March and early April are the best time to visit, since the wildflowers are out in full force, and the entire Plain is painted in shades of green, yellow, orange, and blue. (Don't go in the middle of the summer, though, unless you like triple digit temperatures.)

The next place I want to add to the list doesn't strictly feature the San Andreas; the town of Hollister's bisector is the Calaveras Fault, though the Calaveras branches off from the San Andreas just south of the town. The seat of San Benito County may lack scenes of breathtaking beauty that could make even a non-geologist drool, but it's also one of the best places to see the bizarre California-centric phenomenon known as aseismic creep. Creep is a phenomenon in which a fault moves slowly and steadily at around the tectonic loading rate, constantly releasing stress in a way that does not radiate seismic waves and generally prohibits enough buildup to cause a large quake (though some creeping faults may have asperities within the creeping zone that still accumulate stress and rupture seismically, even though creep continues around that zone). The main place (if not the only - I haven't heard of it elsewhere) this has been observed is in California, specifically on the Hayward, Calaveras, and Rogers Creek Faults in the Bay Area, the San Andreas between Parkfield and San Juan Bautista, and the Superstition Hills Fault near the Mexican border.
Creep can be measured with all sorts of complex instrumentation, but its easiest for the layperson to see when some sort of manmade structure gets put on the fault, and proceeds to get bent and deflected and cracked. The cities of Santa Rosa, Berkeley, Hayward, Fremont, and others all have the trademark offset curbs of a creeping fault, but I personally think that Hollister is the best city to look for offset because it looks like they've put less effort (or money) into patching up the distortion. Some sidewalks are bent several feet out of line, many streets are crossed by sets of en echelon cracks, and some houses and garages have obvious bulges in the walls and cracks in the foundation.

So Hollister is a good place to see creep as a phenomenon in and of itself, but it's also a clear exhibition of the interaction between the Earth itself and its inhabitants, of how people keep living in some places in spite of the geology. I suspect the fault was not known to be there when Hollister was first founded, which could explain some of the spectacularly bad locations of houses, but towns like this can be an example of how the hazards of the landscape should be taken into account when planning future development.
Not to mention that such intersections of humanity and seismicity make it clear that Fault Monitoring is also pretty darn important...

100 things...

2009-02-23T22:22:00.000-08:00

So, since the upcoming Accretionary Wedge is about our personal addenda and recommendations for the Geologists' Life List, I figured I should do the actual original meme before writing up my entry. No matter how late on that bandwagon I may be...

The ones I've done/seen are in bold. Comments are in italic.

1. See an erupting volcano Not yet, but it seems very possible for April or May!
2. See a glacier
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta.
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia) How about Luray Caverns, in Virginia?
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile.
8. Explore a subsurface mine.
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California). There is no excuse for why I haven't seen one of these yet.
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere.
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada.
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate.
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones)
18. A field of glacial erratics
19. A caldera
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high
21. A fjord
22. A recently formed fault scarp How recent is recent? I've seen one from 1971...Failed miserably at finding the Landers scarp, though.
23. A megabreccia
24. An actively accreting river delta
25. A natural bridge
26. A large sinkhole Apparently there is a sinkhole in the middle of the 215 freeway right now...
27. A glacial outwash plain
28. A sea stack
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals
33. Petrified trees
34. Lava tubes Another thing I will probably get to see in April or May!
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. Saw it out the window of an airplane...
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing
45. The Alps. In Germany, Austria, and Italy. Though I went there for music-related reasons...
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below. There's also no excuse for why I haven't been to Death Valley yet, but that will probably be fixed this year.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck
52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault This could mean so many very different places!
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event Does the Blackhawk Landslide in the Mojave count? Or does the question imply having actually witnessed the sliding?
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches) Again, might happen in April or May!
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0. The M5.4 Chino Hills quake on 29 July 2008
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil) I have olenellid trilobite heads from the Marble Mountains, Mojave Desert.
85. Find gold, however small the flake
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand. Part of me really wants to. Another part of me would probably collapse into a quivering ball of terrified.
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope. Also, Jupiter.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century Hyakutake in 1996 and Hale-Bopp in 1997.
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane Does a tropical storm count? Been in several of those, but none were actually hurricanes when they got to where I was. Going out on the beach during a tropical storm is not really pleasant, even if it's interesting - getting pelted with sand at 60mph hurts!
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash

That is not exactly the greatest showing ever. But I must remind myself that I've only been involved in geology in a non-popular-science-books-and-documentaries way for less than two years. I guess that's not so bad?

Geology: Bringing Families Together

2009-02-21T18:51:00.000-08:00

My younger brother is not much of a phone person. He actually isn't much of a continuous conversationalist in general, due to a combination of autism and a wide array of interests. In person, this makes him the King Of The Non-Sequitur, and a single conversation could contain traces of politics, football, recaps of favorite TV shows, NASCAR, video games, and whoever he's decided he thinks is hot. Sometimes these may all happen in a single paragraph.

He's just never really gotten the hang of the phone, though. A typical conversation with him consists of, "Hi, how are you?" And I'll respond, and he'll go, "Ok, bye!" He usually has to be prodded to talk to someone to begin with.

But this week, when I was on the phone with my parents, he specifically asked to talk to me. The reason for this? He's enrolled in Callan's intro geology course at Northern Virginia Community College, and clearly knew this would be something I'd be glad to discuss with him. (I think he's finally catching on that I don't care about NASCAR in the slightest.) To my utmost surprise, he talked with me about the topic of igneous rocks for fifteen minutes straight, with no changes of subject or express of unease about the phone itself. Fifteen whole minutes!

I was, of course, thrilled that he expressed such enthusiasm about the subject matter (and Callan, I'm sure you'll want to know that he got almost everything right when I quizzed him on things), but I think I was even more excited about the evolution of his conversation skills. It was really wonderful to talk with him for that long, especially since I only get to see him twice a year. Even though he didn't tell me directly how he's doing - he never does - I can tell he's getting along well and happily, based just on how vivid and prolonged that conversation on rocks was.

(And because I am so happy, I am going to embarrass him on the internet! Hah! Sibling duty! Even though I'm absolutely certain he doesn't read blogs. Love ya, M!)

Volcanic Hazards for Humanities Majors

2009-02-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

I have emerged from the depths of mid-quarter reading onto the island of Three-Day Weekend to make a post to my blog!

I taught my very first geology lecture on Tuesday. While I'm not technically a TA this quarter, I will be next quarter, and this lecture was for the same class. I ended up teaching this week because my adviser was out of town giving talks, and needed someone to cover for him. The class in question is one of those massive nonmajor earth science requirement courses - Natural Hazards. (Or, Ways The Earth Can Kill You, For Non-Majors.) This is normally a huge 500-person course, but the section this quarter is part of a special year-long course on California in general (first quarter was an English class on California novels, third quarter is on Native American history), geared at humanities majors in particular, and there are only 75 of them in the class. A slightly less formidable audience for a first big lecture!

This was not the first time I've ever taught; I was a TA for a year in the music department, but that was a much smaller class. My discussion sections had five students each, and they were supposed to sing for me. I have already found that it's much easier to impart information on a topic to a group of people than to make them practice a practical skill that they really really don't feel like doing. (It's especially hard when some of them can't even tell that the note they're singing isn't even in the same ballpark as the note I'm playing for them.)

Anyway, the lecture I got to give was about subduction zone and continental caldera volcanoes. This was very exciting to me, because volcanoes were my first geologic love, at age five or six. When you're that little, books about volcanoes tend to also be about earthquakes, so I quickly developed an interest in those as well, but the volcanoes did come first. My adviser's previous lecture had been about Hawaii and Iceland, so I got to jump right in with the really big booms. It necessarily had to be a pretty simple lecture in terms of explanatory science (the textbook states everything in terms of The Three Vs Of Volcanism: Volume, Volatiles, and Viscosity); I was supposed to cover the phenomenology of big bad eruptions more than anything else. I spent a good long time on pyroclastic flows and lahars, with historical examples from all over the world, then went into more depth on sequence of a stratovolcano eruption by describing (of course) Mt. St. Helens. (I also mentioned that Mt. Redoubt is a stratovolcano with imminent eruption, though not on that sort of scale, and I was surprised that nobody seemed to have heard of it!) I ended by tying these rest-of-the-world examples in with specific California sites (ski Mammoth before it blows, guys!), and by showing video of the Salton Sea Mud Volcanoes, because they're awesome.

I really tried to impart the impression that, "These volcanoes are fascinating, beautiful, and can totally kill you," and I really hope that more than just the two talkative students came out of the lecture sharing my enthusiasm and trepidation over all things volcanic. As I expected, based on the undergrad level classes I've taken here, the class was pretty quiet and stonefaced throughout, and they seemed loath to actually answer the questions I asked, even though it was stuff they totally should have known from the previous Thursday's lecture, if nothing else. I hope that their lack of response was just because I was the new unfamiliar guy, and have no actual grade-giving power. Because seriously, how could anyone not find extremely explosive volcanoes even a little bit cool?

Despite the unresponsiveness, I enjoyed giving this lecture, and it was definitely valuable practice for future TAing and lecturing in years to come. I'm looking forward to properly TAing this class next quarter, even though I know to expect some degree of apathy from people who are mostly just filling gen-ed requirements. I'm hoping I'll be able to indoctrinate at least a few of them into enthusiastic geogeekery!

Northridge At Fifteen

2009-01-17T23:07:00.000-08:00

I don't actually remember Northridge. I was nine years old at the time, but I also happened to be living just outside of Washington DC at the time. January of 1994 was memorable, but mostly because it was single digit temperatures, the furnace broke in our house, and so much ice fell out of the sky that my friends and I literally ice skated on the front lawn on Super Bowl Sunday. I'm sure I did hear about the earthquake in Los Angeles at some point, but I don't actually remember it.

It seems like there isn't a whole lot of remembering going on in the media today, either. The LA Times website has a photo gallery, but it's not a top-story link, and it wasn't in the print edition. They did run a short story about building codes, specifically about how soft first story buildings are bad, but the article was rather impersonal to my mind. Cal State Northridge's website mentions nothing. Papers more local to me (which are, admittedly, not super close to Northridge) mention nothing. This strikes me as weird, because I know so many people who have Northridge stories. Granted, they don't just volunteer them; the stories tend to come out when I mention the quake specifically (as I often do, as an example of why blind thrust faults are very scary), or when I mention that I've never personally felt ground motion strong enough to scare me. Once the topic is breached, they seem glad to tell me where they were, exactly what they were doing, how it all felt. Their stories are generally quite detailed, particularly considering most of my friends were also pretty little at the time.

And yet, despite the details, it takes pulling to get those stories out. I'm wondering if that comes from the larger culture of the region, the whole image Southern California as sun-drenched carefree paradise and home to the stars. What could possibly go wrong here? We don't have wildfires! We don't have earthquakes! Because if we let anyone know that we do, nobody will come here anymore. For these reasons, I really shouldn't have been surprised that media coverage of the anniversary has been unimpressive. The annual ceremony at Lotta's Fountain this most certainly is not.

I think the stories need to stay out there. They should be collected and available. They shouldn't be allowed to leave the public consciousness. Sure, they may reside in the minds of people who were here, but to everyone who has moved out here in the past fifteen years, what about them? As a relative newcomer to the West Coast myself, I wouldn't have heard the personal details unless, as I said, I started the conversation about them. The information needs to be out there, not to scare people, but to keep them informed and safer. Stories about, say, 1906 might be ample and fascinating, but that's a different city and a different age and a much bigger earthquake. The Los Angeles of 1994 was not that drastically different from now, and Northridge therefore shows the effect of a quake on a modern city. Not to mention that it shows that you don't need The Big One in order to still be Big Enough. How can anyone prepare if they're only hearing the scientific side of what we're in for, rather than the personal side as well?

Last week, after the 4.5, the LA Times ran a short article about how 2008 had more moderate-sized quakes than 2007, and how it was the most seismically active year since 1999 (which included the 7.1 Hector Mine quake and its aftershock sequence). My immediate wonder was if this means that any stress shadows left behind by Landers, Hector Mine, and Northridge are starting to dissipate. It is, of course, far too early to say if this will be a continuing trend, and no seismologist who cares about his or her reputation is going to use those figures to predict anything. But let's say, for argument's sake, that seismicity continues to be higher in the next few years. Shouldn't we be trying to pull people's awareness out of that post-Northridge stress shadow as well?

4.5 in the Inland Empire

2009-01-08T23:44:00.000-08:00

There was a magnitude 4.5 earthquake in San Bernardino tonight, with a depth of 8 miles and a fault plane solution that suggests strike-slip, but not the San Jacinto or the San Andreas.

I would have liked to have live-blogged this from the epicentral region, but my iPod didn't want to pick up the coffeeshop's internet, so I had to drive home. But when I say "epicentral region," I mean it. I was about four and a half miles from the epicenter when the quake it. I've been closer to them before, but those were all much smaller - as in, 2.6. 4.5 was a whole different kind of experience this close.

I was at a coffeeshop in Redlands with some friends; we were all sitting at a table outside. I felt a little wiggle, and apparently so did a few of the others, since someone said, "Hey, is that an earthquake?" There was time for some confused looks before the shaking got stronger, and the general response was, "Oh yeah, earthquake!" It then proceeded to get even stronger for a little bit, before fading. I'd say that, on the whole, it could have been up to fifteen seconds of shaking. The thing that really excited me, though, was feeling three wave arrivals. I know I felt S and Surface for Chino Hills in July, but I wouldn't have felt P in a car with good shocks. Sitting outside, though, there's no such damping. There were definitely three different jolts, each stronger than the last. This one was a really good ride, and it made my day.

I'm also really curious to see how well QCN did in terms of picking this one up, since many more people are running the software than there were for Chino Hills. I know that my laptop picked up a good waveform for that one, and I'm hoping it did for this one as well, since the computer was by itself and not being used at the time of the quake. There isn't a way for me to scroll back that far through my computer's own records to see if I picked it up, so I'm guessing I won't know until tomorrow, at least, providing that those of us who picked up the signal get an email about it, like last time. I'll post on here about it if I do find out.

There was also a magnitude 3.3 aftershock about an hour after the mainshock, but I didn't feel it because I was in the car. I think I was actually going over the dreaded 10-215 interchange (which goes directly over the San Jacinto Fault) at the time, so it's really good that I didn't feel it. I admit that, every time I go over that interchange, I think, "Not now, San Jacinto, not now!" Feeling a shake on that overpass would probably break my brain.

AGU 2008

2008-12-25T16:07:00.000-08:00

...or, How I Psyched Myself Out, 1906-Style

I have finally recovered from the conference-excitement-lack-of-sleep, the redeye flight, the jetlag, and the frantic preparations for a certain winter holiday. Now it is time for the belated Conference Post! I'm going to do AGU all in one go, since my attempt to day-by-day blog SCEC failed worse than an unreenforced masonry building in a 7.8 quake. One of my resolutions for 2009 is to be better about posting more things in a more timely manner - and about commenting more on all of your posts as well!

Monday, 15 December
My flight from Ontario (California) left at a perfectly sane 9 AM, but I was kind of stupid and spent three hours on the 14th playing bluegrass music with friends, then realized that I still had to pack and get everything ready. The end result was that I only got about three hours of sleep, between late bedtime, not sleeping well due to excitement, and having to get up at 6 to catch the airport shuttle. Despite crappy weather, there were no problems getting to Oakland by air, and then by BART to San Francisco proper. My main thought after checking in was food, though, and I was able to meet up with friends from school for this reason. Upon looking at the schedule, we realized that none of the talks that afternoon were all that relevant to our own research, so we decided to take the afternoon and be lazy zombie tourists and go stare at the sea lions at Fisherman's Wharf. The sea lions are awesome. I think that if I lived in San Francisco, I would still go down there to watch the sea lions. By the time we were done there, it was late enough that I could check into the hotel. This was exciting, because hotels.com happened to be having a huge rate sale on a particular historic place the day I was checking rates for AGU. I therefore got to stay at The Palace, established 1875, which managed to not shake down in 1906, even though the fire still gutted it. It was rebuilt in time for a 1908 reopening, and the interior is still very different from modern hotels. It really felt like staying in a different time, particularly since there was no internet in the room and I was thereby cut off from my little white lifeline to the intarwebz/modern world. I was utterly thrilled by this notion of antiquity, even though I think it ended up psyching me out a little.

Tuesday, 16 December
The psyching out started immediately. I'd set my alarm for 7 AM, but I woke up at 5:10, and couldn't fall asleep again until the clock had gone past 5:12 - which was the exact time of the 1906 quake. At least I did fall back asleep, and I was excited enough about going to sessions that waking up at 7 wasn't hard. My first order of business, though, was to help set up the UCR booth in the exhibition hall. My adviser had sent me to SF with a suitcase full of propaganda, a banner, and a string with which to somehow put up said banner. I wasn't quite sure how to set this up, and after much frustration, the kind people at the Rice booth took pity on me and gave me velcro, which worked. After everything was set up, I went to a session on fault zone evolution through the seismic cycle that gave me a bunch of ideas for things to look into/possible directions to go once I've entered into Dissertationland. Sure, I'm still in Thesisville, but the more ideas the better for later! I met up with my adviser and his other student for lunch, and we discussed those ideas, as well as some work on tsunamis I might be helping with this coming winter. On Tuesday afternoon, I went to a session on earthquake faulting, which turned out to be much more about using waves to characterize/outline fault zones than about fault mechanics. This meant I didn't get nearly as many ideas for my own work as I had from the morning session, but it did fill me in on some of the background I don't have, so it was still a very useful thing. I spent the later session on Tuesday browsing the exhibit hall (and picking up all kinds of stuff, and doing such things as finally joining the Seismological Society of America). The evening was filled with having dessert before dinner, then celebrating the birthday of a friend who was also at the conference, and who is abandoning Riverside for Winnipeg. I will assure her here, as in person, that polar bears will not eat her during her fieldwork.

Wednesday, 17 December
I woke up at 4:31 AM. Though it was early, I was initially glad, since I thought the psyching out had only lasted one day. Then I remembered that the Northridge quake was at 4:31 AM, and it was on the 17th of the month (though January rather than December), and I felt like punching my subconscious in the face. At least I was able to get back to sleep this time as well, and to wake up just fine at 7. I spent the first part of the morning at the UCR booth, which managed to attract no visitors whatsoever while I was sitting there. None of the other school booths seemed to have much attention either, probably because they stuck us all in the back, but it was still kind of lame. The second half of the morning was spent in a session on earthquake simulators, which covered different types of code people were developing to run individual quake simulations, as well as longer-term whole-California multi-cycle simulators. One of these talks involved a state-wide simulator and the phrase, "This starts with the Hayward Fault going in 2008." There was nervous laughter. Would it not be a worst-case scenario not just for that fault to go, but for it to go while all of the people who study quakes are in a place that would be hit hard? Yikes! I noticed one Andrew Alden standing behind me during this session, but I didn't want to turn around and mention that I knew him from Teh Intarwebz mid-session. He left before I could catch him and say hi. I managed to miss the first afternoon session (I'd planned on going to one on earthquake strong motion) because it took so long to find a restaurant without a line, then to still wait and eat, then to go drop off/pick up stuff in my room. I did make it back for the 4 PM session on fault simulations, but this also wasn't want I expected - it was mostly lab friction experiments, the highlight of which unrealistically involved melt spewing out of a rotary fault plane.
There was one thing about Wednesday that I'd been eagerly awaiting from the beginning of the conference, if not earlier - namely, the geoblogger meetup at the Thirsty Bear. I'd read about this meetup last year, before I'd started my own blog, before I'd been accepted in to the geophysics program. I wanted to be there and meet you guys, and I'm so glad I got to this year! It was great to meet Kim, Ron, Lee, David, Dave, Jay, and Sciencewoman in person; we talked about all kinds of things, from which people in our respective parts of the field should be known to people outside the field, to where are good places for gigapanning, to what should or shouldn't be put in a blog. Ron posted photographic evidence and more details here.

Thursday, 18 December
I woke up at 5:20 and immediately thought, "Yes, progress!" before going back to sleep. I was pretty much a slacker about attending things on Thursday morning, too. I did at least cruise through the poster hall to look over the tectonophysics posters on understanding strike-slip fault systems, and some of the seismology posters on laboratory fault experiments. The best part about this was a few posters on the Garlock fault, its geometry, and the possible stress conditions that could have led to its formation and current state of motion/slip. We sort of had a little Garlock fanclub going in that corner as we discussed these things, and I came out of that with another set of ideas for Dissertationland. After this, I went to lunch with my friend who's abandoning SoCal for the Great White North, and I kept giving her crap about the souvenir San Francisco thermometer in the chocolate store might be a good reminder of California, but it didn't go low enough for where she was headed. She also admitted she'd rather be eaten by a sea lion than by a polar bear. Thursday afternoon made up for my morning slackerness, though; all of the fault dynamics seismology talks were that afternoon, as well as the strike-slip system tectonophysics talks, and in some cases, I was torn over which talk I wanted to hear more. Not fair, I say, putting the two most relevant sessions to my work at exactly the same time! I ended up running back and forth between these two sessions quite a bit, and I think I made good choices for the specific talks, because both Thesisville and Dissertationland received many new idea-inhabitants. A friend of mine who was a SCEC intern at UCR over the summer had a talk during the latter seismology session - her first ever conference talk - and she did a particularly good job and received good questions. For this resounding success, as well as the success of one of our department's undergrads at her Wednesday poster session and at my impending Friday morning session, we (three students, plus my adviser and a friend of his from a nearby school) went into Chinatown and had dinner at a fantastic restaurant called House of Nanking. My adviser's friend told the waitress to hit us with the kitchen's best shot, and they kept bringing out plate after plate of delicious food. I highly recommend this place, though I don't remember the specific address. I just know it's on Kearny, and on the left, if you're walking from Market. On the walk back after dinner, we got a UCR fault dynamics lab photo at Lotta's Fountain, which is the site of the yearly 1906 anniversary ceremony.
I'm the short one with the seismogram sweatshirt.

Friday, 19 January
I woke up at what felt like early, but was frustrated and refused to open my eyes for a few seconds. Finally, though, morbid curiosity gave in, and I opened my eyes just in time to see the clock switch from 5:12 to 5:13. Curses! I only got to sleep for another hour after that, because I had to be at the Moscone Center by 7:30 to put up my poster. I was initially worried, since they'd given me a Friday morning session, that most people would have left, but the hall ended up being as packed as it was earlier in the week. I'd put up a sign saying I'd be at the poster from 8 to 10, but so many people came by with good suggestions and input and thoughts and questions that I ended up staying and discussing until 11:15, and the only reason I left then was because I had to check out of the hotel. Almost all of the input was positive (the one negative response was along the lines of, "I don't see what this research is for," rather than "you suck and this is stupid"), and I came out of the session with more specific ideas of what I am going to do immediately next, before writing up this paper, as soon as winter break is over and I'm back in the lab. It also did a lot for my confidence - while I feel like I'm doing good work, and people in my department have said so, I still have a serious nagging confidence issue directly related to my background in music. People saying they wanted to keep in touch on the progress of my work was awesomely encouraging, as was the fact that some of the main people who work on fault geometry issues told me that I had impressive results for just one quarter of grad school so far. The music issue only even came up with one person, and he was pretty much floored when I told him. A couple more conferences like that, and I think I'll have squished the lack-of-confidence issue pretty well. After checking out of the hotel, I had lunch and coffee with a friend who's a geophysics undergrad at Berkeley; he wasn't attending AGU, but he came across the Bay to hang out, which was a lot of fun. We had very nerdy conversations, walked around a lot, and he made a point to show me some buildings that still had very obvious 1906 burn marks. For all I've read about that quake, for all the photos I've seen, seeing the scars in person drives it home all that much more. Once he left, I spent the last part of the afternoon in the poster room, hovering near mine (though I had no more visitors) and skimming others that I hadn't had a chance to check out in the morning. I was actually pretty sad when it came time to finally take the poster down and head out, since I'd enjoyed myself and learned so much in those five crazy busy days. At least I didn't have to leave the City yet, though; I hadn't managed to get a flight to Washington DC (where my family lives) until the 20th, so I had a whole other day, even though I had to relocate to a different hotel in Millbrae.

Saturday, 20 December
I woke up and the clock said 5:12. Even removed from The Palace, it continues! Ahhhh! I was free to not set alarms and be generally leisurely that morning, though, but even without deadlines, I still was on BART back into San Francisco by 10 AM. I spent the entire day just wandering around the City on foot - along the Embarcadero, stopping for lunch at Fisherman's Wharf (and spending more time watching the sea lions, of course), then taking the streetcar back into the financial district and wandering up and down many of the streets. I was trying to find as much 1906 as I could - that is, buildings that had withstood the storm, or those that were proud to proclaim they were among the first ones to be rebuilt. I found quite a few. Some of them, like the Hotel St. Francis or the Flood Building, were ones that I knew specifically to look for, but I came across just as many by accident. They're in there among all the newer buildings, integrated into a city that's beautifully eclectic, speaking loudly of a history from which they recovered but cannot - and should not - escape. They show that San Francisco could take what was thrown at it, and if it could be that strong then - even with the lack of scientific knowledge, and with the bad handling of certain aspects of the recovery effort - it will hopefully be as strong the next time. And there will be a next time, which struck me as sadder than ever after spending a week in San Francisco. I couldn't help but visualize walking down the devastated streets of the historic photos, with the jagged broken brickwork against a dusted-out blue sky, all the while I was glad for being in the solid modern city. Thinking about that, and walking past Lotta's Fountain and the burn-scarred DeYoung building every day on the way to the Moscone Center, made the concept of leaving San Francisco even harder. Some part of me worried - irrationally, I hope - that it might be gone before I could go back. I admit to almost having cried, thinking both about 1906 and about having to leave. But leaving had to happen, and I took BART to the airport, had stupid layover in LAX (worst airport EVER), and red-eyed it over to Washington DC, where I am now.

And so it was a great first AGU. I got so much out of it - from the insight and background into all things earthquake, to specific ideas for my own research, to meeting all kinds of awesome and interesting people, to the realization that I totally want to live in San Francisco some day. I already look forward to next year!

Geological Morbid Curiosity

2008-12-06T19:24:00.000-08:00

I completely failed to feel a magnitude 5.1 earthquake last night. A paleoclimatologist friend and I were at one of those paint your own pottery places making holiday gifts for relatives, and the only way we found out about the quake there, in absence of the internet, was a USGS text message and another message from an ethnomusicologist friend asking if I'd felt it. The quake was out near Ludlow, in the middle of the Mojave, a good 80 miles from Riverside. I was impressed that people here felt it at all, especially with all the faults and mountains between here and there, but apparently several thousand people still did. I was admittedly extremely disappointed by this, and kept harping on about it for the entire night.

My harping about not feeling it led to discussion of things we have experienced. While I can talk of bad Virginia winters (blizzards of '93 and '96, hideous ice storms of '94), my paleoclimatologist friend described her experiences with the Landers and Northridge earthquakes. Despite knowing full well the damage and injury that these earthquakes caused, I realized I was actually jealous that she'd been there and I was stuck on the east coast. I guess this explains why I'm a seismologist, huh?

And then, the conversation turned to the matter of whether or not all people who study active and potentially dangerous processes have some morbidly curious internal (or open) desire to experience that major dangerous process in person. It's not that we want to have anything to do with the loss of life and property that would come out of disastrous process of choice; some of the work we do is to try and avoid that loss! It's just curiosity about the actual process, and about wanting to know how much of the hypothesizing and modeling in our work would be comparable to the real thing.

My friend admitted that she's intensely curious to see what would happen if a large part of the Greenland ice sheet catastrophically collapsed into the ocean. And I admitted in turn that, even while being scared by that video of simulated wave propagation for the ShakeOut scenario, part of me does want to be here when the next Big One rips the San Andreas. I certainly would be terribly depressed to see that degree of earthquake damage up close - I wouldn't wish it on anyone even on my crankiest nastiest of sleep-deprived days, and I wouldn't want to experience the damage myself. The photos from 1906 that so fascinate me do so partly (even largely) because they're an unimaginable sort of horror. But yet, I admit to being extremely curious about what that degree of close-up shaking would feel like, and I'd love to see the surface rupture, and I'd particularly love to get a look at all the data that would come out of such a quake.

Do any of you geobloggers (or other readers) share this sort of morbid curiosity? If there were some assurance that your major/sudden/cataclysmic geologic process of choice wouldn't hurt anyone, or that you'd get to experience on a version of Earth otherwise devoid of civilization except for yourself, what do you have to admit you'd like to be there for?

Or are my friend and I the only ones, which makes us perhaps uncomfortably weird?

Hiking Lake Elsinore

2008-11-30T22:52:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, as a means of combating the sloth and gluttony inherent in Thanksgiving weekend, some friends and I went on a nine mile hike in the Santa Ana Mountains, above Lake Elsinore. It was a trip intended just for walking and being outside, rather than a specifically geological venture, but I was still pretty psyched about getting to hike around in a fault zone with which I didn't have much up close experience. To my disappointment, the trail we selected was far enough up into the mountains that the fault trace itself wasn't actually visible, and all of the outcrops we encountered were between granite and granodiorite, with rounded weathering, and undeformed/unmetamorphosed. (I was not the only one slightly bummed - the only bugs we saw were termites, which was a disappointment to the entomologist on the hike, and the two plant biologists were not thrilled that most of the vegetation was invasive.) That said, it was still a wonderful hike. The weather was great, the scenery was gorgeous despite its lack of faults, and it just plain felt good to get out and walk without the purpose of going somewhere. I wish I could afford the time to go and do this more often in the middle of the quarter. Backlogged homework would kill me dead if I tried, though.

On the drive down from the trailhead, there were some fantastic views:
You can see three of southern California's most prominent peaks from here: from left to right, Mt. Baldy (highest in the San Gabriels), Mt. San Gorgonio (highest in the San Bernardinos), and Mt. San Jacinto (highest in the San Jacintos). You also get a great look at three major fault zones: the San Andreas runs at the foot of the San Bernardinos, from just to the right of Mt. Baldy off to the end of the page; the San Jacinto runs in front of its like-named mountain, branching off the San Andreas to the right of Mt. Baldy and continuing in the other direction toward the end of the image; the Elsinore is in the foreground, with one strand on either side of the lake. Lake Elsinore is, in fact, there to begin with because of this extensional stepover in the fault (and I miiight even look at the possible dynamics of that particular stepover in my thesis, maybe).

This panorama also illustrates a particularly heinous case of Houses On Faults. The houses directly on the banks of Lake Elsinore are smack dab on the fault trace, but the neighborhoods that sit between the base of the Santa Ana mountains and the lower string of hills directly opposite the lake are sandwiched in that extensional zone. That does not bode well for ground motion in and of itself, but it becomes an even sticker situation when you consider the soft lake sediment around there. I also wouldn't be surprised if the liquefaction hazard there is much higher than in pretty much the rest of the Inland Empire (though I'd have to look it up - I haven't done that yet). The houses we drove past also look pretty new, likely newer than the Alquist-Priolo act. I guess most of them fall within the fifty-feet-away clause, but really, what's fifty feet compared to the speed of P-waves? The Elsinore may not have one of the higher seismic hazards in California according to this spring's figures, and it may not be as well known of a fault, but it definitely does still move (last September's 4.7 was on the Elsinore), and I definitely wouldn't want to live on it.

I would, however, be more than glad to hike there again.

UC Riverside Shakes Out!

2008-11-14T16:24:00.000-08:00

Thursday the 13th was the Great Southern California ShakeOut, a regionwide drill preparing for a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault. I first heard about it - though before it was named - in an article in the local newspaper comemmorating the 150th anniversary of the 1857 quake. I guess it was obvious at the time that UCR would be involved; when I found out that we weren't planning anything, I was shocked and disappointed. My adviser and I were ashamed to not raise our hands at the SCEC conference when Lucy Jones asked whose institutions were participating, and it was then that we decided we really need to push for UCR to participate in the drill after all.

My adviser did an an amazing amount of work in a small amount of time, and all kinds of things fell into place. On 21 October, Dr. Lucy Jones of the USGS, local go-to seismologist on the news after any sort of quake, and one of the driving forces behind the science backing up the ShakeOut drill (not to mention someone with whom I have played chamber music), came to our campus and gave a speech discussing the science of the fault and the impact on life and infrastructure that such a quake would have. The talk was geared toward people who do not study earthquakes, and while the turnout was less than we hoped, those who did come asked some really good questions and seemed really effected by Jones' description of the rupture's progress and what it would mean for southern California. I've heard Jones talk about ShakeOut before (at SCEC) and have read some of the publications about it, but the simulation and its ramifications still make me personally shake a little each time I hear about them. Watching that animation of the rupture's progress makes my heart beat very fast, and hearing about the damage draws inevitable (and totally fair) comparisons with 1906, in terms of how much is different now, but how much would end up so close to the same.

On 4 November, Dr. Kim Olsen of San Diego State University came and spoke specifically to the Earth Sciences department about ShakeOut, and how several different types of models of the same rupture scenario had been run by several different institutions. The main ShakeOut drill is based on a kinematic model that makes for high shaking along the fault itself, as well as intense wave guide action focusing equally high shaking into Los Angeles itself. Olsen showed that this kinematic model need not be the gospel of what would happen on this hypothetical rupture pattern anyway; dynamic models of the same thing still show higher shaking in the same places as the kinematic models, but that the intensity of shaking is less all around. It still wouldn't be [i]good[/i], but it could make a difference. (After the talk, Olsen joined our department at the local pizza place/pub to watch election results pour in. Like with charts where red represents high shaking, we were all glad to see much less red than we feared on those election maps.)

In the process of planning for getting the entire campus in on the actual ShakeOut drill, we decided that some sort of earthquake awareness fair on campus would help people understand what they were getting under the desk for, and that there is a real and scientific basis for this whole event, rather than just nebulous fear of a hypothetical "Big One." We decided that the display should have a section on the ShakeOut model/scenario itself, coupled with further information on what one should do in a quake, a section discussing historical earthquakes in California or of magnitude/impact comparable to the ShakeOut Drill (we featured 1906, Wenchuan, Northridge, Chino Hills, Sumatra-Andaman, and the 1690, 1812, and 1857 San Andreas quakes), and a few posters and computer screens showing off the particular work being done in our department. We also slathered posters advertising the drill and fair all over campus - three rounds of posters over the course of the quarter, in fact. The last set said, "A magnitude 7.8 earthquake will hit southern California. We don't know when. Wouldn't you rather be ready sooner than later?" We figured scaring them a little bit would be more likely to get some attention in a place that seems pretty jaded or in denial about its seismicity.

The actual drill was on the 13th, as it was across the state. Our campus' response didn't involve elaborate emergency simulation complete with fake blood and guts, but every teacher holding a class at 10 AM was supposed to lead their students in a minute of Drop Cover And Hold On: a length of time that could be a minimum for shaking in this sort of earthquake. In the case of our department, it was the total opposite of any real earthquake - we stopped what we were doing with setup for the fair, went inside, and got under the table at the right time. I don't know how many other students actually paid attention to the publicity we had for this, and while I hope most of them knew, I kind of also hope some were genuinely surprised, as everyone really would be. I also have no idea how many teachers actually did the drill, but I'm hoping that it was most to all. There was a siren on campus that was supposed to aid in the "emergency" feel of this, but everything I've heard from people suggests that it just plain wasn't loud enough. Our department was the only one that did the actual evacuation as well, and that did go smoothly, though not without loud overacted remarks to be careful of all the rubble.

The fair ended up being a huge success. Many people stopped by to at least look at things, and many more asked questions. I didn't see how many people bought things from the emergency supply vendors we had come in, but they seemed pleased when it was all over as well. I was personally manning the booth about historical earthquakes, and I got a lot of good questions and stories - I met someone who had been in Anchorage in the massive (9.2) 1964 quake, and I met someone else whose grandmother had been in San Francisco in 1906. I also unintentionally scared the crap out of some recent east coast transplants by merely mentioning that the southernmost San Andreas has been paleoseismically shown to go about every 150 years, but hasn't popped since 1690ish. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised by that, even though I felt bad, since that little statistic scared the snot out of me when I first moved out here. We definitely opened the eyes of a few native Californians, though, which was so much of the goal.

At the end of the day, our whole department was feeling pretty awesome, but in the middle of our celebrating that success, I had to keep looking back toward the San Andreas, the real "star" of the show, so to speak. It was, of course, smooth and quiet at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains, something you probably wouldn't think of if you didn't know it was there (or, well, if you weren't an earth scientist). As the sun started going down, I couldn't help but imagine a dark surface rupture scar ripped along there, and that the usual SoCal smog was quake-induced smoke. That mental image was enough to make me want to thank the fault for not doing that yet, for waiting until after ShakeOut, for allowing people to explain to others what the Fault can do rather than showing everyone itself.

Geosong: Kathy Kallick's "The Quake of '89"

2008-10-17T21:58:00.001-07:00

I've given up on even pretending about the "...of the week" part, but I still have plenty of songs!

I've already highlighted a few songs that were either explicitly about Northridge, or were released within a year or so of that earthquake. I've only come across two songs (thanks to Kim for the second!) about Loma Prieta, however. Since today is the 17th of October, which is the 19th anniversary of that earthquake, I'm going to feature one of them: Kathy Kallick's "The Quake of '89."

Kathy Kallick is another musician I'd never heard of before I started compiling the Fault Poking Playlist. A quick bit of googling tells me that she's originally from the Chicago area, but moved to the Bay Area in the 1970s, where she started a bluegrass band. She's lived in that area since (making her Loma Prieta experience firsthand, rather than a song about a thing on the news), and while bluegrass is still her main musical style, her solo albums have a more diverse set of influences.

"The Quake of '89" is not stylistically bluegrass. It is more of somewhere between mainstream country and pop, very upbeat, with guitars and keyboards. The fact that it is such a musically-upbeat song about a very serious topic, though, is very much in line with bluegrass.

The lyrics combine a personal reaction to the quake (building up supplies to prepare for the next one, planning escape routes, feeling generally freaked out) and some intrapersonal conflict, in that Kallick seems to be singing to some unknown significant individual (I'd guess a lover, since it's a pop-ish song, but it's not really clear) about how everyone who cared about her contacted her after the quake except for that person. Considering how many of my east coast friends and family called me after this summer's Chino Hills quake - much MUCH smaller than Loma Prieta! - I would agree with Kallick that it takes a pretty darn insensitive and inconsiderate soul to not check in when something really big does happen.

But for the storyline of the song, the thing that still really gets me is the chorus, specifically the first line of it:
"The earth went bang, there were two big waves."
Yes, we have specified P-waves and S-waves! And this is a country/pop song. It's not meant as an educational song, it's not by a scientist or for in-joke scientist consumption. It's mainstream country/pop song, written by a professional songwriter who experienced the quake, and we've got specific P-waves and S-waves and the truck-hitting-building sound that comes with them. This level of detail in a song that's not a novelty or an educational tool makes me irrationally happy.

There's another line in this song to which I can closely relate. Near the end of the song comes the verse:
"I've been thinking a lot about bridges,I've been thinking a lot about time.
Things shift into focus when your life is on the line.
To me, that was the message of the Quake of '89."
I cannot, of course, relate to this regarding Loma Prieta specifically, since I was five years old and in Virginia at the time. But my life being on the line in that car accident in 2007 (which was not on a bridge, but the road was raised) definitely put a lot of things into focus for me, and was one of the reasons I decided to go for it and change majors. I have no plans to write a song about that accident, but an event that can instill the same clarity after fear in thousands of people, an event like Loma Prieta, is undoubtedly worthy of musical treatment, even without explicit mention of P- and S-waves. Those just make Kathy Kallick's song a particularly good one.

Lyrics
Kathy Kallick on Rhapsody

Rapid-Response Seismic Array Drill

2008-10-15T22:49:00.000-07:00

I had my first experience in setting up an array of seismic stations this past Thursday! In conjunction with the Great Southern California ShakeOut - though not directly part of the drill - one of the professors in our department wanted to do a practice rapid response deployment on the San Andreas. She asked for volunteers among students and faculty alike to help with the deployment; I jumped at the chance, initially thinking it would just plain be a good experience. I realized a little later that, if there were to be a significant earthquake in the area, and if part of this professor's job is to go out and deploy stations, those of us who helped with the practice run might actually be enlisted to help out when the real deal happens. Exciting!

Our practice run took us to Whitewater, California, between Palm Springs and Cabazon. This little bitty town sits on top of the active Banning strand of the San Andreas, and part of the fault's trace is indicated by a distinct band of green trees set against the brown of Whitewater Canyon's plant life and rocks. The green part, however, was not the part where we put the stations. We had permission from the owner of a large chunk of the land in the canyon to pepper his property with equipment. (For a House-On-Fault guy, he seemed pretty with it. Not that choosing to live on the fault is the best move, but he knew its general direction relative to the house, had the house retrofitted, and was willing to let scientists do their thing!) We actually had a harder time finding the fault on this guy's land than we would have expected. All of the fault features were subtle, and within our group of about ten people, we had three different guesses, though all were within about 100m of each other. In the end, I think we got pretty darn close to sticking our "midpoint" station on the actual fault, since it was easiest to dig holes there, and the soil got chunkier and with larger rocks the further out from the midpoint we went.

We set up eleven stations: one supposedly on the fault itself, five to the north, and five to the south. The first four of each of those were spaced 50 meters apart, with the final station 100 meters away from the previous one. We did the installation in stages, visiting each station a few times throughout the day, rather than doing each step in one go and leaving the station be. The first step was digging holes - two per station, one for the strong motion sensor and one for the weak motion sensor. I personally dug five holes, and definitely felt it the next day.im in ur fault diggin holez

After the holes were finished, we set out the equipment. Each station included a strong motion sensor (with the brand name EpiSensor - gotta love how punnable seismology really is!), a weak motion sensor, a solar panel, a GPS transmitter, a control box for the solar panel, a control box for the entire setup, and a truck battery. The third pass over all of the stations was to actually hook all of the things up, turn them on, bury the sensors, and try and keep the boxes of equipment and solar panels out of view from the nearby road. This proved to be no small feat for the station furthest to the north, since the site was maybe 50m from said road. But we were resourceful and tricsky, and using various tumbleweed and dead creosote bush parts and various other partially burned dead plants, we constructed a row of bushes where there had only been tufts of grass before. It looked natural from the road, and we made sure to actually secure the wood in the dirt, and to weigh it down with rocks. Here's hoping it doesn't blow away!
Marvel at our artificial bushes! There is a solar panel in this photo, really!

The last step was to make sure all the sensors were recording as they were supposed to. The weak motion ones could be set off with a good hard stomp, but we were having a hard time testing the strong motion ones. Stomping, even in conjunction, barely got a flicker. It required dropping of the largest liftable rocks on site to get a testable reading. "Can You Trip The Strong Motion Detector" definitely sounds like some sort of strange game show, does it not?

The deployment ended up taking most of the day - not exactly the most rapid response ever. Naturally, people who aren't doing this for the first time can get stations up much faster! I'd like to think our little UCR crew would be faster the next time, too. The stations will stay in place for about two months. Since that particular section of the fault has a lot of microseismicity, these stations ought to pick up some events, making them definitely useful for more than just an installation drill. And if the Big One does hit within those two months, well, we'll be a step ahead in the deployment, right? Riiiight?

SCEC Day Five

2008-10-11T11:52:00.001-07:00

Hey, it's only a month after the conference ended, and I'm finally to the last day!
Whaaaaat?
(Now that this is the last one, I probably really will post more, and will get to the field trips and songs and stuff. Stupid "I must finish this before I do that" mentality!)

SCEC DAY FIVE

This was really only a half day of substance, and half of that half was closing off all the organizational and planning stuff. The middle chunk of the morning, however, was occupied by a panel debate over whether geologic or geodetic rates are better for evaluating fault slip rates and seismic hazard. The discussion centered on major faults east of the San Andreas, namely the whole series of Mojave right lateral strike slip faults; the faults in the Sierras, Owens Valley, and Death Valley; and the Garlock. The consensus of the debate was an agreement to disagree, with a call to finetune both methods of figuring out slip rates, with the hope that they might eventually come to more of an agreement. But even though the topic was slip rates, about halfway through the debate, I realized I was left with more intriguing questions about cause and effect in terms of why those faults are there. Does the Garlock's presence compensate for the expansion of the Sierras and further east, or is part of their expansion due to having this east-west fault there to slip along? I've heard enough different opinions on the Garlock from talks and conversation that, with the wondering that came from this conference, it is really high time for me to delve into whatever papers I can find on the matter. (Though, on the other hand, I should read the papers relevant to my specific current project first...) Still, anyone have any particular favorites or suggestions?

I slipped out of the room for some of the last bits of organizational talk, and it seems like I wasn't the only one to do so. It was during that time that I finally caught up with the people to whom I was supposed to show my drawings - namely, some of the organizational people for The Great Southern California ShakeOut. I showed them the comics, with the offer to do something similar as ShakeOut event propaganda, gratis. I had no idea what sort of response to expect, since the main things I see when I look at my own drawings are all the flaws and mistakes. Fortunately (surprisingly!), the response I got was flatteringly positive, and I was told outright that I was being too modest about my work, which only made me blush more. Discussion quickly fell on the fact that ShakeOut is really darn soon, and this comics-about-earthquakes thing could be applicable to broader outreach/awareness (aimed at high school/undergrad), rather than just to a single event. The thought was that I could do two different comics - one SoCal specific, one Bay Area specific, both featuring the San Andreas character, as well as characters of some more localized faults. Color me (ha-hah...) excited! I haven't heard anything about this since the conference, but I'm not about to send poking emails just yet. Since we decided it's a not-just-ShakeOut thing, and ShakeOut is next month, I figure that the drill is everyone's sole priority right now. Hopefully this will develop into a real project eventually, though!

I go to the last hour of closing-off-the-meeting talk, though I was admittedly a little distracted by the prospect of the outreach/awareness drawings.

Even with all the organizational stuff, I thoroughly enjoyed my first ever conference/meeting. It was a fantastic chance to meet many of the major people in the field in a relatively small setting (around 500 people), and to see a lot of the research that's being done (albeit in concise poster form). It was also exciting to get my own first ever poster out there and to get feedback on it. I got new ideas for things to look at/model next from pretty much everyone I talked with, and that may very well have been the best part over all.

The deadline for AGU abstracts was the last day of SCEC, and I submitted mine that morning. I'm looking forward to that as well, though by size alone, it should be vastly different from SCEC. Should I expect to see a lot of geobloggers there?

SCEC Day Four

2008-10-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

I will finish! I swear! And then I have, oh, five field trips, one earthquake, one appearance in an Associated Press article, and a bunch of classes to write about. Augh!

Day Four of SCEC was the biggest day for me, in that it was the day my poster went up. I put it up as early as I was allowed to do so, then resisted the urge to hover around it the entire day in hopes of people stopping by to ask questions. I was good and actually went to the talks instead!

There were three talks on Tuesday. The first was about May's Wenchuan, China quake. It was basically a tour of the surface rupture, while mapping where there was more vertical versus more horizontal displacement. This varied widely along the fault, and even though it was largely a strike-slip earthquake, there were still vertical displacements up to five meters(!) in some places. All of these extremes were accompanied by photos, and the presenter seemed to have everyone's rapt attention. Later on the day was a talk on earthquake early warning systems, which mostly focused on the one currently being tested in Japan. It was a good talk, but people kept walking in and out because the hotel staff put ice cream right outside the door, so there were noise (and sugary) distractions. The last of the talks was on using the codas of seismograms for imaging, and I really couldn't follow much of it at all. As soon as the speaker got into the methods, everything became almost entirely lost on me. (Turns out my adviser was kind of lost, too, so I felt a little better about having no idea what was going on.)

Between the second and third talks were more of the focus group meetings, including the Faulting and Rupture Mechanics group, which is where my research falls within SCEC's divisions. Like with the Extreme Ground Motion group the day before, though, this was a discussion that was light on the science and heavy on the deliberation over which terminology to put in the mission statement. But if this is how science works as an organization, it is still important for me to see it, even if I end up doodling a lot.

After the third talk was the first actual poster session. For all my excitement in putting up my poster in the morning, I actually didn't end up lingering near it in the afternoon. This was because the other person who is working on the bent faults project, other than my adviser and I, had finally made it to the meeting, and we needed to talk about his thoughts on results thus far and where to go next. He had some interesting things to say about the results thus far, and gave me more ideas for future directions of research, while helping to narrow down the next step in this particular project. He's not personally going to be involved until I start doing some field things, or start modeling some more complex geometries, but it was good to actually talk with this guy I'd only previously heard about.
The evening poster session actually (finally) involved me standing by my poster and answering questions. About ten people dropped by, which was certainly a pleasing number for me. Most of them just asked me for a basic summary (after which the Harvard people started doing complex math out loud in front of me, which was a bit intimidating, but I guess that's why they're Harvard people!), but the guy who stuck around the longest and asked the most questions was a geologist working on hazard evaluation. He said he was very interested in the future results of my stepovers and bends work, and that he'd keep an eye out for how it's going. He also mentioned a few real places I should look at once I've shored up my results with hypothetical faults. I was glad for the direct suggestions; the whole day was another one on which everyone I talked with gave me ideas, though, even if indirectly.

I didn't manage to find the people to which I was supposed to show artwork by the time I was about to pass out from tiredness on Tuesday, but I was also too tired to worry about it at the time.

SCEC Day Three

2008-09-23T15:50:00.000-07:00

Apparently, if I set deadlines for myself (as opposed to following other people's deadlines set for me), I completely fail to meet them. Oops. That said...

SCEC DAY THREE

My adviser showed up on Monday morning, which was a definitely relief for me in terms of the social aspect of the conference. I'd already been getting a lot out of the science by just listening, but I'd been feeling really shy about approaching people and talking. It's like I got this mental block where they were all Big Prominent Important Scientists and I was newbie-with-a-music-degree. Fortunately, my adviser is very outgoing, and he started introducing me to all kinds of people and initiating all sorts of conversations. I'm sure I'll get better at starting conversations myself the longer I'm in the field, but this time would have made for a very quiet Julian if not for my adviser.

There were three talks in the morning, all related to The Great Southern-California ShakeOut, a huge earthquake drill slated for this November, which many others in the geoblogosphere have addressed. The first of these talks focused on the scenario itself - a magnitude 7.8 quake on the San Andreas, rupturing from Bombay Beach to just south of Tejon Pass. (I actually still wonder about the choice of stopping point, since it's not quite to the bend yet. My research thus far has to do with how bends and stepovers of particular lengths and angles stop rupture, and so far, none of my models - very simplified though they may be - stop before hitting the first corner/bend. So I want to know more about that choice for ShakeOut!) This first talk also discussed of of the events associated with ShakeOut other than the earthquake drill itself, most prominently a Quake Awareness Fair in Los Angeles. The second of the talks took off from there, discussing further ways to raise public awareness and to further research. It was only in the course of this talk that I found out that UCR was not slated to participate in ShakeOut, which I find pretty inexcusable, since we're one of the core institutions of SCEC. Since then, we've managed to get the school administration's attention, so there's still hope and time for us to get involved. The third of the morning's talks was about planned emergency response to the ShakeOut scenario, and I have to admit that this particular talk got dull quickly. Very important stuff was outlined in it, but important does not mean it's necessarily interesting to listen to.

Day Three of the conference was also the day that the actual science planning part of the meeting got started. I went to the planning session for the Extreme Ground Motion focus group, and the discussion was less about the actual science of ground motion and more squabbling over how to word the focus group's objectives for the next year's Official Science Plan. The highlight of this discussion was that some figures based on models an undergraduate friend of mine ran were put up on the big screen and discussed for a while; they were mentioned as the work of her adviser, though, and I could tell that my adviser wanted to get up and say they were the work of an undergrad, but he refrained from doing so. My friend felt pretty awesome about that all for the rest of the day, though, at least as far as I could tell.

There was one more big group talk after lunch, and it was tangentially about ShakeOut, in that it used the simulation as a springboard for engineers to re-evaluate the building code. The discussion quickly got away from the actual earthquake and went into statistical methods employed by engineers to figure out best-case and worst-case scenarios. My eyes admittedly started crossing a little from it all, though I did pick up that this speaker, like so many other people at SCEC, was of the opinion that Riverside is going to be completely screwed when The Big One hits.

The same posters that were up on Sunday stayed up through Monday, so I took the afternoon poster session time to attempt to make some quicktime movies of my models, which I realized only during the conference that I'd forgotten to do in advance. This was tricky, because the server on which I'd run the models had been hacked several days before SCEC, so remote logins were super tightly guarded. My adviser fortunately was able to get in, but only with a very slow connection, and then the files turned out to be too huge anyway.

Monday's dinner was the only indoor meal of the whole conference; the air conditioned venue was to honor a few members of SCEC who were retiring/going to different jobs. There were enough people discussed that, if we'd honored each on a different night, there could have been several air-conditioned dinners. Why did nobody else think of this?! At dinner, I got into a conversation with the same USGS person who told me about Salton Sea explosives that somehow led to me pulling out some of the earthquake-related art I've done. She seemed to really enjoy it, and told me the names of several people she felt really needed to see this stuff. Finding those people became part of my mission for the rest of the conference.

Mineral Meme

2008-09-12T22:29:00.000-07:00

That mineral meme seems to still be working the rounds through the geoblogosphere. Here's my results.

Instructions: Use bold to indicate minerals you’ve seen in the wild. Italics is for those seen in laboratories, museums, stores, or other non field locations.

Andalusite
Apatite
Barite
Beryl
Biotite
Chromite
Chrysotile
Cordierite
Corundum
Diamond
Dolomite
Florencite
Galena
Garnet
Graphite
Gypsum
Halite
Hematite
Hornblende
Illite
Illmenite
Kaolinite
Kyanite
Lepidolite
Limonite
Magnetite
Molybdenite
Monazite
Nepheline
Olivine
Omphacite
Opal
Perovskite
Plagioclase
Pyrite
Quartz
Rutile
Sanidine
Sillimanite
Silver (native)
Sphalerite
Staurolite
Sulphur (native)
Talc
Tourmaline
Tremolite
Turquoise
Vermiculite
Willemite
Zeolite
Zircon

I guess that's not bad for a newbie, is it?

SCEC Day Two

2008-09-12T17:08:00.001-07:00

It would appear that I have failed miserably at live-blogging the SCEC conference. That said, I will still post about each day at a time! Just, you know, offset by a few days. I'm studying strike-slip faults; I'm good at offset. Yeah...

Day Two of the conference included a field trip for students only. Our advisers and mentors all got to sit in the too-cold hotel and listen to organizational talk, while we got to go hang out in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Despite the 110-degree heat, we students clearly got the better end of the deal.

The purpose of the field trip was to look at features of the San Jacinto Fault, and the trip was led by a PhD student whose dissertation is on the particular part of the fault we visited. I got the impression that, given how the trip leader described what a scarp is and how it formed, and how streams get offset, that this trip was more geared toward people who had not seen fault features up close and personal before. That said, I am always glad for a chance to poke those features, particularly in places I haven't been before! The San Jacinto in Anza Borrego has many strands, some separated by a couple of kilometers, some only by a few feet. The latter manifested itself by chopping an alluvial fan into narrow shreds; the shred moved by the most active strand of fault is also marked by a four-foot scarp. There were also offset streams on all sorts of scales. The trip led us from one that was only deflected by three feet all the way to one that, rivaling the San Andreas' Wallace Creek on the Carrizo Plain, was pulled over a hundred feet to the right. That is quite a testament to the power of this young and active fault!

(I took a ton of pictures of these features, but all the good ones are in the form of panoramas, which I have not yet stuck together yet. I'll be posting them once they're done!)

We took about half an hour for lunch, then continued on to look at a mylonite zone high on a ridge. In order to get there, the tour bus had to go on a narrow and winding road that was clearly not designed with tour buses in mind. This made me nervous in and of itself, but I nearly started shaking when the bus turned toward the edge of the cliff. I realized, only when we did not start falling, that there was a turnaround here and we were actually trying to park. Parking was successful, but that still wasn't a shock that I needed. The mylonites in question were down the cliff from the bus, and only about half of us (myself included) actually climbed down to look. I was disappointed that they did not clang harmoniously beneath my feet (as Kim has observed with a different mylonite zone), but they made up for it by having very clearly defined shear/scrape marks, even on top of the elongated mineral grains. This is not something I'd seen up close before, and I thought it was very very cool.

On the ride back to Palm Springs, I was still so excited about the trip that I was sure I'd be awake and alert enough to catch the end of the Southern San Andreas Fault Evaluation (SoSAFE) workshop, but as soon as I got back into the air conditioned hotel, the exhaustion of spending several hours outside in the desert in summer hit me, and I decided a nap would be the obvious use of my time (or rather, my body decided this for itself). The most useful thing I did for the rest of the evening was help a friend of mine put up her poster (there were two sessions, hers was in the first, mine was in the second). I looked at a few posters as well, but my attention span was shot from tiredness, so I mostly took mental notes of which I wanted to come back to the next day and look at in more detail. I was not too braindead to appreciate the plate tectonics puzzle game for little kids, though. I think I want one, nevermind that I'm 24!

SCEC Day One

2008-09-06T23:04:00.001-07:00

I have been entirely absent for the last week and a half in order to get things together for my first ever geo conference. Models had to be run, figures had to be made, and posters had to be assembled. But all came off well, and I am currently at that conference! I'm planning on making daily posts to summarize what's going on. I'll try to get back to the songs next week!

The Southern California Earthquake Center's annual meeting is part conference (mostly posters, but a bunch of talks, too) and part organizational meeting to discuss the organization's scientific goals and progress. There are only about 500 people here, so it's certainly no AGU, but that's probably a good thing for a newbie's first conference.

This meeting happens to be in Palm Springs. Were it winter, this would be fantastic, but considering it is September, it's a monumentally bad idea. Here's why:

Aaand it was 111 today. I guess their reasoning must be that, if you're going to be studying earthquakes and faults in southern California, you'd better get used to baking in the desert. Perhaps this is also their reasoning for holding all the meals outdoors - just like field work, right?

I think this might also be a factor in the decision to have the conference at this particular hotel, though:

This is basically the most appropriate street name for a conference on California earthquakes EVAR. Unlike the Andreas Avenue in San Bernardino, though, this one is actually a good five miles away from the fault.

There was only one actual session's worth of science today. This was the first part of the Extreme Ground Motion focus group's report. Their work over the past few years has been focused on Yucca Mountain. This is a site in the middle of the Nevada desert that is a possible repository for a frightening amount of nuclear waste. The site is also on the edge of the caldera of an extinct volcano, and is sliced by a series of normal faults. It does not take a scientist to realize that large earthquakes plus nuclear waste cannot equal anything good. SCEC's ExGM group has been working to determine how serious the seismic threat there actually is. So far, the conclusion seems to be that the probability of ground motion strong enough to release the radioactive material is incredibly low. The faults in question show only several hundredths of a millimeter of motion per year, and are all relatively short. There are cliffs and mountain faces that have also been dated to show that they haven't moved much in the past million years, or even since the Miocene, when they formed. There are pack rat middens that are thousands of years old and still in place, suggesting no strong ground motion within that span. One paper also looked at pore structure in sedimentary components of Yucca Mountain, noting that laboratory-induced strong motion crushes the pores to a certain shape that cannot be restored, and the rock at the mountain does not show this crushing, indicating that there has been no extreme ground motion there since the deposition of these units. I get the impression that, even though the threat is not as high as initially thought, the group still doesn't want the waste dumped at Yucca Mountain, though. Can't blame them for that!

At dinner, I finally got to meet the guy whose dynamic code I'm using for my models; it was cool to talk to someone with whom I had only interacted by email thus far. I also met someone from USGS Menlo Park who just plain didn't believe me when I told her this was my first conference, because she was sure she'd seen me somewhere before. We concluded it could've been a random run-in in Parkfield or something. She also mentioned that the Menlo Park seismic imaging group will be doing some work down by the Salton Sea next year, for which they would like to have students help out. Apparently, explosives are involved. Playing with explosives for science? As a Mythbusters fan, how could I not turn down that opportunity?!

The shower in my hotel room has a temperature gage with degrees Fahrenheit on the knob. Out of curiosity, I tried to set it to what today's air temperature was, and it turned out I couldn't do so without pushing the big red Super Duper Hot button. Bad sign! I did not push the button. I will continue to delight in the fact that the AC makes it pretty cold in my room. And now I sleep - field trip in the morning!

Modeling Woes

2008-08-25T13:03:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should revel in the irony that is getting a segmentation fault error while compiling a model of a fault with segments, but right now, it's just getting on my nerves. I set this model up just like all the others, only with a different angle! The others all worked! Why not this one? Perhaps I will enjoy the irony more once I've fixed it.

I submitted my first ever conference poster abstract last week. Is anyone here planning on going to the Southern California Earthquake Center conference in Palm Springs on 6-10 September?

A Cinematic Connection...

2008-08-24T22:14:00.000-07:00

As a still-fairly-raw newbie to the field of geology, my sphere of connections within that field is limited to the people in the department at UCR and to the geoblogosphere. (The latter of course, means that my sphere of connections is growing quite quickly! But in terms of the whole discipline, I assume that's still a fairly small group.) Being new to the field formally, however, does not mean I haven't used geo-geekery to connect to things that are not specifically scientific!

Remember my post from the Accretionary Wedge about geology movies? If not, it may be a bit TL;DR, so in summary: there is a movie coming out in 2009 or 2010 called 1906, and it is indeed about the earthquake and fire. The book upon which the movie is based is kind of dreadful, since all the characters are too perfect and don't act like normal human beings, and since it refers to the San Andreas Fault by name and talks about plate tectonics in 1906. The good news is that Brad Bird, of The Incredibles and Ratatouille fame is writing the screenplay and directing the film, and Pixar is doing the special effects. This means the movie will look awesome, and the characters will be reshaped into believable, realistic, empathetic, and flawed humans rather than turn-of-the-century Perfectionbots. I was, however, worried that things like the two-years-too-anachronistic SAF references might slip by.

I mentioned worrying about it in that post from March, and then I kept thinking about it for a couple of days after writing that post. After thinking about it, compelled by geekery, I decided to try and make a connection for which I thought I must be crazy. Yes, I wrote a letter to Brad Bird.

I left out the part about the Perfectionbots, since they are not his fault and I'm sure he's fixing them. As I said before - and as I said in the letter - he can make talking rats completely credible and believable! Humans in crisis should be a piece of cake. I focused on the purely geological- the San Andreas and the tectonics, devoting a paragraph to each. I also apologized profusely in advance if I came across as an "insufferable know-it-all/geek" in the letter, and if the production team already knew all of that stuff.

A bunch of time passed. When I got back from the east coast in mid July, my apartment manager handed me an envelope she said had been sitting in the office since June and she'd kept forgetting to give to me. The return address was for Pixar

Yes, Brad Bird wrote back!
And it's not just a, "Thank you for sending fanmail LOL" kind of letter. It is three paragraphs long, mentions specific things in my letter, and is very gracious and friendly in tone. I also got the impression, though I could easily be wrong, that they didn't necessarily already know the things I mentioned.
Take a look:

First fanmail for 1906! And he even quoted me on "insufferable know-it-all/geek." I was pretty much glowing when I received this letter. The "token" mentioned at the end was two signed prints: one of a scene from Ratatouille and one of a "family picture" of The Incredibles.

So being a geology geek can, apparently, be enough to make a connection - no matter how brief - with one of today's biggest names in movies. This is only made more exciting when that brief connection reveals that the big name in question is not only brilliant at what he does, but awesome and considerate enough to keep in touch with his fans and write personal responses...and to put up with nerds such as myself. I'm already planning to write another letter once I've seen 1906, and I will be very surprised if I cannot say I was as pleased as he'd hoped.

Geosong of the Week: The Sundowners' "San Andreas Fault"

2008-08-20T13:19:00.000-07:00

Getting tired of that song title yet? Well, tough, because this isn't even close to the last one!

This week's song falls into a category that hasn't turned up yet in my song reviews: songs that use geological features and events as metaphors for other things, but don't actually focus on those events. The Sundowners' "San Andreas Fault" is probably the first song I found in this category (I think - I don't know the exact order in which I found these!), and I was actually kind of surprised that a song with such a title really has so little to do with earthquakes.

The metaphor here is of the San Andreas as a ticking time bomb - but not of the blow everything into smithereens type. I'm pretty certain that the songwriter was aware how the fault works, since the metaphor also involves pulling two people away from each other. Yes, we have a seismically-inclined failed relationship song here. The lyrics don't outright mention pulling apart, but the rest of the song makes it plenty clear that this is what's going on.

The Fault's name only comes up twice:
"Feels like I am standing on the San Andreas Fault. I believe it's only a matter of time. All you pushers and you shovers and you disenchanted lovers better take a number and move on down the line."
"Hello, operator, can you get me someplace else? Anywhere but here would be alright. It feels like we are standing on the San Andreas Fault, and you and I are running out of time."

Actually, "move on down the line" fits in nicely with the impression of strike-slip motion, but I'm sure the songwriter wasn't thinking that far into this!

The rest of the song describes the problems between the singer and his significant other, and what needs to happen in order for the relationship to work out. The significant other seems to be at fault here (hey - this song doesn't use that pun, so I had to get it in there somewhere!); s/he's apparently guilty of all kinds of lying and mistrust and afraid to sacrifice anything for the greater good of the relationship. The accumulation of stress seems like it will eventually snap the singer's patience just like it snaps a plate boundary. Good on him, I guess, that he wants to get out before there's an enormous surface rupture scar ripping his house and heart in half!

Reviews of the album this song is from, Strange Hours (2001), describe The Sundowners' style as a mixture of modern and classic rock, and lyrical all the way. I think that pretty much pegs it. There is nothing particularly special or outstanding about the style, but this song at least is pretty darn catchy. It has gotten itself firmly stuck in my head in the past, and it's an enjoyable enough song that I didn't mind.

Based on CD review sites (the band's own website doesn't seem to exist anymore, and I can't find anything on them past this CD, so I assume they broke up), The Sundowners are based in North Carolina, which is not a place that generally gets associated with earthquakes in any shape or form. The fact that they've chosen the San Andreas as an impulse for songwriting shows the extent of its infamy, and how it has wormed its way into popular culture as something big and dangerous and shaky. People may know that the San Andreas Fault is that earthquake thing, even if they haven't had a geology class (much like how the Richter Scale has become a popular metaphor/reference, even if people don't understand how it works). But then again, pop infamy could play into the misconception that the San Andreas is the only earthquake thing in the States, at least. And there are still all too many people in California (a good third of the class when I took Geo 1) that don't know what the fault really is.

The most likely thing is that I am reading too much into a catchy pop song. But is that not what I promised to do in these blog posts?

The Sundowners' Strange Hours on Rhapsody
I can't find the lyrics already typed out on teh intarwebz, but if people want it, I can transcribe.

Pull-apart basins of the Inland Empire

2008-08-18T13:19:00.001-07:00

Last Wednesday, despite the ludicrous August-in-SoCal temperatures, those of us who are hanging around the UCR geology building this summer had the opportunity to go on a field trip to look at pull-apart basins on the San Andreas and San Jacinto Faults. The trip was led by one of the senior faculty members here, who worked at USGS for a long time (and whose name is on quite a few USGS maps of the area) before coming to teach here; I'd heard he leads some awesome field trips, so how could I pass this up, weather aside? Long story short, there was no disappointment whatsoever, and I learned almost more than I thought possible for a four-hour air-conditioned car ride.

This trip managed to tell three different stories. The first was structural; the pull-apart basins we visited on this trip come from extensional stepovers within single faults, in this case right-lateral strike slip faults that step to the right of each other. As the faults pull, the land between them subsides, creating a basin that's ripe for flooding. Sediment accumulates in these basins, and the rapid subsidence also causes the sides mountains surrounding the basin to slough off in landslides. Most of the mountains we saw showed rolled landslide toes, rather than clean faceted ridges. The San Jacinto/Hemet basin is still actively sinking, and at this time of year, that sediment shows itself as lots and lots of dust. I've been past this area before, and at the time, I laughed at the thought that a completely dry area was marked as a river overflow zone, but this field trip told me why! The subsidence is uneven enough that the San Jacinto River, when it has water in it, runs right up against the base of the mountains. That barrier makes pooling up all the easier, and it doesn't take much water to start spilling over toward neighborhoods and farms. We followed this up by visiting the inactive Mill Creek basin on the San Andreas, near Yucaipa and Crafton Hills. Here again is a body of water (with actual water in it this time!) right up against the mountains. Natural exposures and roadcuts alike show thick layers of sandstone, some with ample evidence of soft-sediment deformation (likely coseismic), between the basement rock on either side of the basin. The extension that formed this basin is also responsible for a series of normal faults in Crafton Hills; the San Jacinto basin will likely develop these as well, given enough time.

The second story here is about mapping. The area around both of these extensional basins has been mapped many times, by several different agencies, and there has been a tendency to ignore features specifically related to extension and assume that the faults are more literally responsible for every geomorphic feature in the area. Subsidence scarps have, in the past, been marked as fault scarps. The sharp boundaries between basement and accumulated sediment - ie, the edges of the basin - are also often taken as faults. The latter isn't just a pull-apart basin problem: the Perris Block, on which Riverside sits, has not deformed much internally in recent geologic time, but it had plenty of internal topography, and the lower points have accumulated sediment as the entire block moves up and down. The boundaries between this sediment and any mountains sticking out of it have been marked as faults, but tracing them reveals that they're essentially round! (Older maps actually put a fault at the end of my street, thanks to this misinterpretation. Boy am I glad this is wrong!) Assumptions that faults sit in front of the mountains also don't quite work for pull-apart basins, since landslides roll off the mountains and cover the trace. There have been several incidents of people trenching the "fault" at the base of the mountain, coming up with nothing, and being happy with that answer. Sometimes, a landslide will re-expose a fault scarp, as with above Soboba Springs, and that scarp seems to slice the mountain almost through its middle. Smaller landslides also obscure several much larger ones that bound the basin; the small ones get mapped and the large ones don't, a "forest for the trees" scenario, to use our guide's term. Fortunately, now that the structure and function of pull-apart basins is better understood, maps can be corrected and updated to better represent the region and its underlying processes.

The final story is one of people building things in really stupid places. The active San Jacinto basin is full of houses, many quite new. They're slightly higher up than the San Jacinto river, but slightly isn't going to help, when the whole area is so much lower than everything around it. And it's not that this is a slow process, either! There are stories of houses that were built 50 years ago, carefully planned so that the high water mark was several feet below where the house stood. Recent floods have dumped four feet of water into those houses. Add in the landslides off the mountains and the being wedged between two strands of one of the most active faults in California, and you've got a big problem. We passed a bunch of houses on fault scarps on the course of this trip, though many of these houses looked older and fairly isolated, likely the personal decision of a landowner rather than a clueless developer. Crafton Hills, however, is a different story. Fault scarps serrate this landscape, and those scarps are liberally dotted with brand new development of large and presumably spiffy houses. There is no way these developments could fit in with Alquist-Priolo regulations, but there they are. Were those normal faults not evaluated as hazardous compared to nearby strike-slip faults? Did nobody bother to trench to begin with? Did the developers blatantly ignore the rules and warnings? I have no idea, but I know I wouldn't want to live there.

Geosong of the Week: The Little Girls' "Earthquake Song"

2008-08-12T20:41:00.000-07:00

Uh. Yesterday was Monday, wasn't it? So much for remembering what day of the week it is over the summer! (Even with the two-day-out-of-seven breaks from model running...)

So you get a Tuesday song. Who decided Monday, anyway? WHO?

In honor of two-weeks-ago's earthquake, I think it's time for a Los Angeles Falling Into The Ocean song. There are a quite a lot of songs that fall into this category on the Playlist, and most of them are quite upbeat. The general consensus among the songs of the Playlist is that San Francisco must be saved and should be revered for persevering despite San Andreas' blows, but that the loss of Los Angeles will benefit the world at large. Also, the singers in the LA-based songs don't generally seem to give a crap that their city is falling down, while it is far more serious business for the SF songs. I think this ties into the whole SoCal Denial thing when it comes to nature, but that's a rant for another post.

This week's song may be one of the silliest on the list. I've mentioned it in this blog before, but I feel it deserves its own post, since it made me laugh so hard that I wheezed the first time I heard it. Despite its unoriginal title, "Earthquake Song," by The Little Girls, is a real gem.

The Little Girls are a pop/new wave band based in Santa Monica. They were popular in the 1980s for goofy novelty songs like this one, but their MySpace seems to indicate that they're still going strong as a group, and even have a new album out. "Earthquake Song" was on their 1983 release, "No More Vinyl." I don't know what time of year this came out, and I haven't googled up anything about the specific impetus for the writing of the song, so I'm not going to claim it's related to the 2 May 1983 Coalinga quake, nor a delayed reaction to the 1979 Imperial Valley quake. I'm just guessing that quakes on the news sparked this song, since they're not often discussed in the mainstream media unless one has just happened.

The music to this song is a classic example of a SoCal surf song. It has all the right driving guitar rhythms and riffs, drum punctuations, vocal harmonies, and backup/contrapuntal lines. If you weren't listening to the words, you might almost take it as a girl group covering a Beach Boys song. But because this music is so dead on to the genre, it allows the words to really shine in context.

Here are the lyrics in full:

There's gonna be an earthquake in this town
There will be houses falling down
The fire hydrants will blow up
The streets will crack
The pipes will pop

It's going kill my mom and dad
They are the only folks I had
But they better not blame me
'Cause it's not my fault

It's always fun living in L.A.
Always a good show on somewhere
What more can I say
There's gonna be an earthquake
I can't miss it, no way

I'm gonna run, run, run
We're having so much fun
'Cause there's a building chasing me
Smack, smack, I just fell in a crack
And now I'm gonna be debris.

There's going to be an earthquake in this town
The dogs are chasing their tails around
There's a buzzing in the air
Maybe I'll die, but I don't care
My surfboard's ready for the tidal wave
I'm gonna ride down Sunset like a Beach Boy today
I only hope I don't wipe-out in West L.A.

Yes, I enjoy living life this way
Always a good show on somewhere
What more can I say
It's gonna be an earthquake
I can't miss it, no way

I'm gonna run, run, run
We're having so much fun
There's a building chasing me
Jump up. Jump back
Break your mother's back
And we'll all fall in the sea
Wheeeee!

It's always fun living in L.A.
Always a good show on somewhere
What more can I say
It's gonna be an earthquake gonna get me
It's gonna be an earthquake gonna get me
It's gonna be an earthquake gonna get me today

Let us review:
Reference to LA treating nature as another showbiz spectacle that'll be out of the news as soon as the next celebrity dates someone new? Check.
Surfing the seismic waves and tsunamis? Check.
Reference to all kinds of earthquake foreboding myths? Check.
Reference to the actual Beach Boys? Check.
Falling into the ocean? Bring it on!
Pun on "fault"? Of course!

I also adore the part about "a building chasing me." It's such a silly mental image in and of itself, even without context, but it becomes more ridiculous when one considers how it's a cheery and blithe reference to outrunning buildings that have been shaken to the point of collapse. Apparently it's ok to discuss damage when it's worded in a silly way, but better not to address it directly until it happens...

Glaringly '80s video of a live performance of "Earthquake Song"

Last Tuesday's 5.4

2008-08-05T20:55:00.000-07:00

Wow, this is something I should've written about exactly a week ago! It may not suffice to say that I was so giddily excited about the earthquake that I couldn't sit down at my computer to spew text onto a single site for more than a few minutes, but yeah. I'm a week late - but I'm still excited about it! This was the largest earthquake I've felt thus far, and that was made more amusing by the fact that, six days earlier, I felt my smallest quake, a 2.6 on the San Jacinto Fault.

I was in the car for this one. I'd just finished buying some food and toys for the faultcats at Petsmart, and was going about 25 mph down the street. I saw that the light was red, so I went for the brake. As soon as my foot hit the pedal, the car wobbled from side to side. Since the wobbling was not yet continuous, I worried something was wrong with the brakes, so I started to push the button that brings up the display that supposedly tells me when something is wrong with the car. (I love how my car tells me when it needs work. Not that it has needed work yet. But!) As I was pushing the button, though, the side to side motion returned in an intensified state. A look around confirmed that street signs and trees were also all wobbly, and that was all the confirmation I needed for the cause of my car's wiggle. The light turned green at this point, so I turned the corner and went on my way, anxious to get home and check the USGS site for a magnitude and location. I figured it had to be at least in the mid 4s, since a car's shocks absorb smaller vibrations. I certainly did not expect 5.6, as the USGS text message said, though! By the time I got to the Did You Feel It page on the website, it was saying 5.8, and my jaw was further unhinging. Except by the time I finished filling out the form, it was down to 5.4. I admittedly felt a bit gipped out of that extra 0.4, but still was excited to the point of being giddy about the whole thing.

Now that I think about the feeling of it in the car, I'm sure I felt two separate wave arrivals. My initial thought was that these were P and S arrivals, but after talking about it with people in the lab at school, it doesn't make sense that the smaller vertical P-wave would be noticeable in a car with good shocks, at least not in a quake that wasn't epically huge. More likely, these were the arrivals of the S wave and the surface waves. Friends of mine who were stationary and in buildings at the time said they felt three separate pulses.

My computer, so it seems, also got a really good ride out of this earthquake. This was the first event of any significance since the Quake Catcher Network alpha test went online in the winter, and thus the first really solid test. According to the event-specific site, there were a bunch of laptops triggered, but three of them had clean and clear records. This says, of course, that more computers involved will mean more clean records on the whole, but it's also good for determining what might make noise on the record, and how to clean it up further.

That QCN worked so well is exciting in and of itself, and I was already giddy from the quake without the QCN factor, so imagine my excitement when I received an email on 30 July from the person heading the Stanford branch of QCN, stating that one of those three spotless clear records came from my own little laptop! That I got a decent recording makes sense - the computer was closed in a room where the cats could not get to it, and thus was only moved by the earthquake. But I have to say I am probably inordinately proud of my computer, since it is a machine and all, for making the top three.
The middle four seismograms came from my computer!

Since last Tuesday, there have been a bunch of little aftershocks that I did not feel. There was, however, a 3.0 on that part of the San Jacinto closest to my building. People outside of the building were definitely talking about it, but it seems like none of them reported it to the USGS, since there's no Did You Feel It map. I know I'm not the only one who felt it! Bah!

Geosong of the Week: High Country's "The Earthquake"

2008-07-28T23:09:00.000-07:00

Even though I've only been playing bluegrass music for a little under a year, I have come to the understanding that it is never a bad idea, when writing a song, to kill off a character within said song, no matter how upbeat the actual music is. It's part of a sort of laughter-and-tears aesthetic that bluegrass shares with a lot of the Celtic music from which many tunes stem: perky fast music, casual wording, depressing substance.

Natural disasters are an obvious way to kill off characters, so I figured I would fire up Google in search of some earthquake bluegrass. And nearly immediately - perhaps because it is the title track of the album in question - High Country's "The Earthquake" turned up.

The lyrics are pretty much what I expected: a happy relationship is destroyed by the house falling on the girl. There is a good sense of the suddenness of the earthquake, though, since the singer keeps talking about how things were, but in the present tense - as if the quake hadn't happened - then juxtaposes the reality of the events against it by inserting a chorus. By the end of the song, the depth and severity of the situation has finally hit the singer, once his beloved has been buried. What I think is the best line of the song comes from this stanza:
"She's lyin' there alone at the mercy of nature, and I've never felt so helpless and small."
To have to put the body down in the earth, when the earth's own "misbehavior" is responsible for her death...that has to be a troublesome feeling. (Though, geek that I am, I couldn't hear this part without thinking to earlier in the verse, where he says she's buried at the foot of the mountain. "No!" I thought, "Don't put her there! Not on the fault scarp! No!")

I also really enjoy the music to this one. I listened to it a bunch of times and couldn't figure out the chords, which was both frustrating and exciting, since this one clearly deviates from the I-IV-V-I progression that's the backbone of so many songs in so many genres. The mystery chord turned out to be a flat III, and its presence made me inordinately happy. The melody that fits over these chords is also incredibly catchy. When I played this song for a friend of mine who happens to be an ethnomusicologist whose Master's thesis was on bluegrass, he immediately said it was a cool song, and I caught him humming it in the hallway a few days later. This song stands up on its own musically, with or without the earthquake factor. Excellent.

Remember last week, how I was saying that people in the mariachi band were threatening to make me sing "La falla de San Andrés"? Well, I still don't know if that's happening, but the bluegrass band I'm in (we're tentatively named Inland Wildfire) is definitely working on "The Earthquake," and yours truly is definitely the one singing it. Terrifying, yes? If we're ever in a position to record it, I most likely will inflict this one on my hapless readers...

But you should listen to the real version first. Here's High Country's Rhapsody page.

Where ATVs and Bruntons Meet

2008-07-26T14:02:00.000-07:00

I haven't been to field camp, and I likely won't get to due to all of the academic catchup that comes with a major switch of fields this late in the game. I did get to take a field mapping course this past quarter, though, and I enjoyed almost every minute of it (I say almost, because the one day where it got up to 105 in the shade, and there wasn't any shade, was a bit intense). The professor outright asked me to take his class, never mind that I didn't have the prerequisite. The class involved ten days in the field, split between two different field areas in the Mojave Desert. Some of those trips were only for a single day - both areas were a nice hour and a half drive away from campus - but there were three full-weekend outings involved, which meant I still got some of the campfire conversation aspect of longer-term field camp.

Of the two field areas, I was particularly taken with the sedimentary-focused one. Mule Canyon is in the Calico Mountains, off the same freeway exit that takes you to Calico Ghost Town. The canyon exposes the bright greens, reds, yellows, and oranges of the Miocene Barstow Formation (though without the fossils, from what I understand), plus some younger caps of purple(!) extrusive volcanics. The name "Calico Mountains" explained itself right there. Mule Canyon ranks up among the most beautiful places I've ever visited, and I really enjoyed mapping it. To me, it was like a giant puzzle, only I had to walk on the pieces to match edges, rather than snapping everything together from one bird's eye view.

The colors of Mule Canyon. I really wish I'd taken a long panoramic shot of the whole place.

We were the only geology class out there for the six days we spent in Mule Canyon, but there was no shortage of other people. Mule Canyon is a popular spot for RVers, offroaders, and shooting enthusiasts. Mapping there was never quiet: there was constant engine noise, spatters of gunfire all too close to the actual mapped area, and one RV that seemed to be in the same spot playing the same Britney Spears CD on repeat for several of our visits. It was also never without its share of idiocy, mostly not on the part of our class: the first day we were there, some visitor had the brilliant idea to shoot across the road, and there were all kinds of incidents of people attempting to drive vehicles up hills that were entirely too steep and sandy to really be wise. (We had fun with this one. One night, well after dark, we saw ATV lights running across what was clearly our measured section - a high and narrow measured section, no less - so the professor led a charge toward them with flashlights. They proceeded to leave.)

But the Britney Spears, the ricochets, and the jeeps cutting back and forth across beds I was trying to map did not even come close to making the experience of mapping at Mule Canyon a bad one. It's too fantastic and fascinating of a place for that. (We only mapped the predominantly-homoclinal section of it. There are crazy folds all around that are absolutely worth going back for.) If anything, I pity the recreational users of that land, too busy putting bulletholes and tire tracks into the landscape to realize its beauty.

The Faultcats Strike(-Slip) Back!

2008-07-22T21:27:00.001-07:00

I really need to clean the piles of papers and books off my apartment floor. It doesn't help, however, that my cats tend to pull books off the bookshelf for fun. Andreas has, in this case, chosen some entirely too appropriate literature to pull down and sit on:

Garlock caught wind of this, and objected that the field guide in question does not represent his namesake. He made sure to show Andreas and I exactly where it ought to go on that map:

(This picture is not posed. Yes, I dropped the rubber band on the book, but that's only because I was sitting near the book in order to get pictures of Andreas sitting on the book. Garlock pulled the rubber band to that particular position all by himself. Smart kitty!)

Geosong of the Week: Kevin Johansen's "La Falla de San Andrés"

2008-07-21T20:30:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the long hiatus, guys! (Is two weeks a long hiatus?) I was on the east coast visiting people that I pretty much only get to see twice a year, and this was not conducive to much internet time. Which was, probably, a good thing, but I still missed mah intarwebz. And now I am back in California and have more time on my hands, but also more geology to talk about, so I will try to be less dead.

But I will start back in with a song.

I have a friend in England who delights in sending me very strange music. One of the all-time strangest she's sent me is a Finnish humppa-rock song about a town where cows say cuckoo and cuckoos give milk. She's also sent me songs in Hungarian, Estonian, German, and Latvian. When I moved to California, though, she said she had the perfect song for me, in Spanish and English. The song in question is by a guy called Kevin Johansen, and it's called "La Falla de San Andrés." (Yes, there are a lot of SAF songs on this playlist.)

Kevin Johansen is Argentinian-American, was born in Alaska, and moved to Buenos Aires at the age of 12, but the gap between birth and that move was spent in the San Francisco Bay area. This gave him more than enough time, apparently, to pick up some seismic lore and plant the seeds for this song. It is not, however, a serious song about earthquake damage or the emotional impact thereof. Johansen instead opted for a type of lyrics that, from what I read, resonates well with the geoblogosphere: puns.

Yes, this is a song that is an elaborate setup for a dreadful geoscience pun in two languages.

No fue mi culpa esta vez! Fue la Falla de San Andrés!
This time it wasn't my fault! It was San Andreas' Fault!

What's not to love?
(I suspect this also works in other Romance languages. But definitely not German or Russian.)

As if this wasn't gloriously goofy enough, the story that leads up to the singer placing the blame on the Fault is punctuated by sound effects. My favorite, hands down, is when the singer describes the Earth opening up, and there's a creaky door noise; the other sound effects are equally ridiculous, in the best possible way.

The music itself is bouncy and Latin - a little bit mariachi, a little bit cumbia. One of the other people in the mariachi band at school thinks we should adapt this to be entirely mariachi, so we can play it with me singing. Yikes! If that happens, I will probably hide from the recording, if there is one.

Kevin Johansen, however, used to have a free MP3 of this song on his website. It no longer seems to be there, which makes me sad, because now it is harder to inflict the song on people. It is, at least, still on his Rhapsody page.
And here are the complete lyrics.

Geosong of the Week: The work of Gustav Mahler

2008-07-07T21:23:00.000-07:00

I'm going to diverge a little from the pop/rock basis of the Fault Poking Playlist this week. This is because today, 7 July, happens to be the 148th birthday of Gustav Mahler, who happens to be my favorite composer (and the subject of my music MA thesis). Mahler was a composer whose creative output happened almost exclusively in spectacular geologic settings, and those settings had a profound influence on his work.

Mahler was essentially a "summer composer." From the age of 20 onward, he worked as a conductor for most of the year, taking the offseason months to do the bulk of his composition - the sketching short scores and drafts of works that he would flesh out and orchestrate during the rest of the year. Starting in the early 1890s, this summer work was done away from the bigger cities, nearly unfindable in the mountains.

The first summer home was in Steinbach am Attersee, in lower Austria. This is about an hour and a half outside of Salzburg; it is still small enough to not have its own train station. The Attersee is a large oblong Alpine lake and has the clearest blue water I have ever seen (I visited in the summer of 2005). Behind it rises the Höllengebirge, a sheer vertical limestone face, 1800 meters high. In his hut by the lake, Mahler composed a good dozen art songs, most of his Second Symphony, and all of his Third. When Mahler was visited in Steinbach by a friend, who asked him to give him a tour of the area, Mahler replied that he had composed it all into his Third Symphony, and that listening to that piece would be as good as getting a tour. The first movement of that symphony is meant to portray the rock that underlies the rest of the environment at Steinbach. Mahler described it as "lifeless, crystalline nature." The movement opens with a unison melody from ten french horns, majestic and solid as the mountain face (and, if you happen to be in the back of the viola section, sitting in front of all of those horns, like getting hit in the back of the head with a big chunk of said rock). Having seen the mountain myself, and having played the symphony, I think Mahler was absolutely right to say he'd captured the landscape in notes.
The Second Symphony, another Steinbach-era piece, has a different sort of geologic significance. Namely, its fifth movement includes a portrayal of an earthquake. In the storyline of the piece, this earthquake opens up the ground so all the senseless dead people can come out of the ground and gather together to be rejoined with their spirits and thereby fully resurrected. Mahler's earthquake is all percussion - rolls on the cymbals, snare drum, bass drum, and timpani, beginning pianissimo and crescendoing to fortissimo over the course of two measures, ending with a bang. To my ear, he got the rattling aspect just right, but at the same time, my experience with earthquakes tells me that even the small ones go BANGrattlerattlerattle rather than rattlerattlerattleBANG. The actual rupture, followed by the building response, not vice versa. My guess would be that Mahler never actually felt a quake (though news of the 1906 San Francisco one really upset him) - or is there a circumstance where the bang could come last?

The second summer home, occupied from 1900 to 1907, was at Maiernigg am Wörthersee, also in the Austrian Alps, not far from Klagenfurt. The setting here is similar to that at Steinbach: house and composition hut nestled in the woods between a wide Alpine lake and steep mountains. The only reason Mahler abandoned his first summer home was the fact that noise from other vacationers got on his nerves, so it makes sense that he would seek the same geologic setting without all the noise. Mahler composed another dozen songs here, as well as most of the Fourth Symphony, and the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies in their entirety. There is no concrete landscape scene for Maiernigg, like the Third provides for Steinbach, but there are still ample mountains and valleys in the verbal descriptions Mahler made of his works from this period. He even devised a very specific orchestrational device here - the low sound of offstage cowbells to represent looking out over the landscape from a high peak.

The third summer home was at Toblach, aka Dobbiaco, high (elevation of the valley in which the town lies: 4072 feet) in the Dolomites of Italy's Südtirol/Alto Adige region. Mahler moved there in 1908, after his young daughter's death in 1907 made the prospect of returning to Maiernigg too painful. Though there are lakes in the area, there isn't a single large one that characterizes the landscape like at Mahler's previous two summer homes. The mountains at Toblach, however, are perhaps more breathtaking than at Steinbach or Maiernigg - they are far higher, and consist more of points and spires and crags than continuous rock faces. Low clouds (of which there were plenty when I visited in 2005) may completely obscure even the lowest peaks in the area. Mahler did not speak so explicitly about working the specific landscape of Toblach into the music he wrote there (Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies), but he really didn't need to. The title "The Song of the Earth" says so very much, and the soundworld coupled with the text to the final movement paint a picture that can only be Toblach at night, if one has seen the place for comparison. That final movement, "Der Abschied" ("The Farewell") is a long and poignant farewell to life, which begins with the sun setting behind the mountains, and ends with praise of the Earth itself, which always renews itself in cycles. Perhaps those cycles are seasons, but for such an inhabitant of the mountains as Mahler, he would likely have been thrilled to know that mountains come and go in great cycles as well.

Geosong of the Week: Ventilator's "Earthquake Song"

2008-06-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

This week's song is much more obscure than last week's, though I actually found it fairly early on in my search for earthquake-related music, thanks to typing "earthquake" into the iTunes music store to see what happened. This "Earthquake Song" is by a Los Angeles-based band called Ventilator, from their 1996 album "Reseda Spleen." (Is that not a fantastic album name? Spleen spleen spleen! And the guy on TV just said "spleen" as soon as I typed it - how weird is that?) It's another Northridge song - this would be evident from the album's release date and the "Reseda" in the title pinpointing the quake's actual epicenter - but the band's MySpace says outright that the idea for the song came after one bandmember's studio was trashed by the temblor. The song is in two parts: a section with lyrics, followed by an extended guitar solo.

The lyrics focus on the aftermath of the earthquake, rather than the imminent shaking, or the exact moment of the rupture. It also zooms in on one person wandering the bewildering postquake city and struggling with the enormity of the situation, rather than taking the city at large as the closest focus.
I couldn't find the lyrics transcribed online, so I'll take a stab at it. If I'm not supposed to do this, someone please let me know!

So you say you've walked the streets today.
What was left unharmed still remains.
Your hands are at your sides, you face me with denial.
How can we rely on our houses?

Gonna need a loan to hold us in.
Feel the movement, continental drift.
Don't be so surprised, your home is now a lie.
Remember how you walked without standing.

I particularly like that last line, since people that I know who experienced the Northridge quake talk about how they were basically thrown out of their beds. Why walk, when the ground walks for you? I also think the line about denial is interesting, since there seems to be a fair amount of it in southern California. There are a few quake awareness campaigns going on in the area now to try and fix this, but when I bring up quakes with non-sciency people, I have more often than not received a remark to the extent of, "Silly east coaster, stop worrying about that!" This song covers the switch from "haha can't happen to me!" denial to "how did that just actually happen?" denial.

Musically, this song hits me with a strong Beatles influence. I don't know if everyone will hear that influence as strongly as I do, but it was pretty much the first thing I thought upon listening, even before I considered the lyrics. The influence is more prominent in the first section of the song - the part with words. I think it's the combination of a modal scale as the basis for the melody, as well as the wide leap in register between the second and third phrases of the verse. Modes and interesting melody contours were not, apparently, things the Beatles set out to do on principle, but I think it sounds good. Ventilator's "Earthquake Song" hits that sound, to my ear, which is a very good thing as far as I'm concerned. The opening guitar riff is also pretty Beatlesy, but the end guitar solo isn't quite as much.

Considering I like this song, there's really no good reason why I haven't listened to the others available on their site yet.

Ventilator on MySpace
You can hear "Earthquake Song" and others on there. And there is not annoying flash.

Geosong of the Week: Natalie Merchant's "San Andreas Fault"

2008-06-23T20:41:00.000-07:00

As someone with a strong background in the arts (visual art in addition to music), the latest edition of The Accretionary Wedge was particularly enjoyable to me. I had a great time reading all of the entries, and I was even more excited to see the numerous posts about geology in song lyrics that ensued. This, I figured, meant it was high time for me to start posting something I'd been thinking about doing for a while.

Last year, a friend and I went on a a road trip along the San Andreas Fault. (This was the trip that led to my accident, and also to the infamous LOLfaults.) In anticipation of such a trip, I figured we needed a playlist of relevant songs. The original list included only twelve songs, some of which were only related to earthquakes when put in context with the others (ie. "I Feel the Earth Move" and "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"), but some of which were directly relevant. The list was a great accompaniment for the trip, but with future trips in the works, the list needed to grow. A boring summer library job was all the time I needed to dig up more. At the present time, the playlist is 41 songs long, out of which about 30 are actually directly related to earthquakes, or mention them explicitly. My plan is to write a post featuring one of these songs each week, at least throughout the summer, if not longer.

The first song I want to feature is the first song I found in this whole project; if I hadn't found it, I might not have thought to build a playlist to begin with. When I mention to people that I have compiled a list of earthquake songs, I tend to get asked if this one is on there: Natalie Merchant's San Andreas Fault.
I get the impression that this is one of the most mainstream/popularly exposed songs on the list. I certainly didn't have to dig far for it. And it's even been quoted in a serious book about the 1906 San Francisco quake (Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World) - not bad for a pop song!

"San Andreas Fault" is a song that seems subdued at first, but despite being quiet and predominantly-acoustic, the story within is devastating, to individuals and to whole regions. This is not a song with a snapshot narrative that doesn't go anywhere. It moves from complacence to conflict within a few minutes. I like this song. I like how the chord progression is different from the standard pop/rock I-IV-V-I. But I think the lyrics make this song - the imagery is very strong and poetic. Here are the lyrics.
I particularly like the image of the Fault moving its fingers through the ground, and the juxtaposition of "promised land" and "wicked ground." (I admit, nerdily enough, to titling an earthquake-related piece of fiction that I wrote "The Wicked Ground," after the line from this song.) Those phrases say so much about California, I think, with the combination of natural beauty and natural danger that pervades the state. I also find the verses about the Fault and its natural force to be all the more poetic compared to the first two verses, discussing human beauty and ambition. Those pale against what nature can do. Indeed, nature has no regard for human goals and dreams.

"San Andreas Fault" is the first track on Merchant's first solo album, Tigerlily, which was released in late 1995. Most of the recording was done in the winter of 1994. This timeline pretty much indisputably pegs this song as being a Northridge song. Since so much music comes as a response to historical events, it makes far more sense that the song was a response to the quake rather than an unconscious anticipation; if it had been written prior to Northridge, chances are there'd be blurbs along the lines of, "OMG SONG PREDICTS QUAKE!" I haven't found anything to that extent. Plus, the imagery in the first part of the song is clearly a reference to LA, what with the discussion of dreams of physical beauty and aspirations to the silver screen.

But the Northridge earthquake was not caused by the San Andreas - Merchant has blamed the wrong fault. This misconception is all too common (I even saw it on Wikipedia at one point, and promptly corrected it), particularly in songs. This is not the only time it turns up on the Playlist. Scientifically, it's an important misconception to get rid of, since people living in Southern California needs to realize the earthquake threat is not confined to one single fault, but is spread over many and is therefore even harder to evaluate and predict. But I suppose it can be excused for songs - if the songs are any good - providing people don't consider those songs to be literal lessons rather than poetic ones.

Natalie Merchant page on Rhapsody. You can listen to the song here.

June Sixteenth

2008-06-19T23:58:00.000-07:00

One year ago Monday, I flipped my car off the freeway and was certain at the time that I wasn't going to survive the wreck.

This Monday, I graduated from UC Riverside with a Master of Arts degree in music composition.

Both of these things are kind of hard for me to believe, in a way, though both for different reasons. I still think about that accident almost every day, but considering how active I am now, driving and not suffering any residual pain, it's kind of hard to consider that it really truly happened, even if I remember all the details so clearly. And it's hard to believe it's already been a whole year, because I still remember it all so well. And as for graduation, after two years of school that became increasingly intense with each quarter, it's hard to believe that it's over (for that department, at least), rather than it's going to get even more intense. Being allowed to stick the letters "M.A." after my name if I feel like it seems almost anticlimactic after all that work.

I obviously never expected the accident. Who would? It took such a short time to occur, and yet changed my summer and my life and work since then in an enormous way. But I always expected that I would earn the Master's in music - and that's ultimately not changing my life nearly as much as I thought it would. I went into it knowing it would be the next step to making myself a better composer who was more likely to get a job in the field. But I'm coming out of it into a totally different discipline, not to the job world or to a music PhD. I certainly didn't expect that before the accident, for all I was fascinated by the local geology, but now that I've started working on it, I'm certainly glad for the change of course. I don't know if I really would have thought in earnest about switching if not for the shakeup that was that wreck. Can I be glad about a effect of an event, while still loathing the event itself? I suppose so, weird though it may be.

Gongs, Gods, and the Ring of Fire

2008-06-15T02:06:00.000-07:00

Java is the most densely-populated island on Earth, both in terms of humans and in terms of volcanoes. With cities built between these peaks and farms reaching uncomfortably far up the slopes, it is no surprise that this volcanism has greatly influenced the culture. National Geographic ran an article on Indonesian volcanoes in culture and the conflicts between spirituality and science earlier this year; I saw discussion when I was first getting into the geoblogosphere. But for all it was an interesting article, and for all the cultural discussion that was there, music didn't come up at all.

A few weeks ago, I got into a discussion with a few ethnomusicologists and an anthropologist over whether central Javanese gamelan music is high art music or not. It is considered one of the major fine arts of Indonesia, but at the same time, this music is used for so many purposes and events that it not, in the strictest sense, art music. But regardless of how it's classified, its aesthetic, origin, and some of those uses are undeniably geological.

A gamelan consists largely of bronze keyed instruments and different styles of tuned gongs, both horizontally and vertically suspended. There are string and woodwind instruments involved, as well as vocals, but the core set of instruments are all heavy metal. The instruments, particularly, the gongs are cast by digging the form into the ground and casting molten bronze into it. The word gamelan comes from gamel, which means "to forge." While the heat from the actual volcanoes isn't used to melt the bronze, the heat of these forges is symbolic of the heat within the volcanoes. With that starting point, it could be read further that the molten bronze itself references the lava, forming the instruments like the volcanoes formed Java to begin with. The instruments are made as a set, not interchangeable with instruments from other gamelans; each set is given a name, often related to the landscape and natural setting of the city in which the set of instruments is to reside. UC Riverside's is Kyai Telaga Semu, or "Venerable Lake of Illusions," referencing mirages in the desert surrounding the university. UCLA's is, amusingly, "Venerable Dark Cloud." I have no doubt that volcanoes find their way into the names, where appropriate.

The most important instrument in a gamelan, though it has the fewest notes, is the great gong. The legend of the first gamelan states that the sultan needed a way to contact the gods, so he invented the gong; other gongs were added to contact other gods, and the ensemble grew. The gods in question are believed to reside in the volcanoes; there are some volcanoes, most notably Merapi, which is located between Javanese cultural centers Surakarta and Yogyakarta, with resident gamelans in caves on the slopes, which are played to keep the godly residents of the volcano appeased and less inclined to induce eruption. To speak to a volcano, the sound would need to be loud and low. The great gong consists of several hundred pounds of bronze, and makes a sound so low that it tests the bottom range of human hearing. When playing in a gamelan, you can feel the gong just as much as you hear it; the compressional sound wave pulses past you, as if the gong is the central vent of a volcano unleashing an explosion, or the epicenter of an earthquake. Even the names of instrument and mountain are related: gong ageng, or "great gong," has the same root as gunung, or volcano. A further connection here is that the animistic spirit of the gamelan resides in the gong, much like the larger gods reside within the volcanoes.

Javanese gamelan music is cyclical. There is a set framework pattern of notes that is repeated over and over, with variations in tempo and underlying texture. This music also has three basic levels of instrumental parts: those that play the framework, those that elaborate virtuosically within the framework, and those that punctuate. The gong is the strongest punctuation - it marks each repetition of the cycle, and marks the very beginning and the very end of a performance of a piece. To me - though I have not yet heard or read anything that definitively confirms or disproves this - having the gong be the beginning and the end at once is like the explosive part of an eruption cycle. Is the bang the end of one buildup, or is it the event that allows the next buildup to begin? Another feature of gamelan music is that more punctuation indicates a more intense mood, regardless of speed and volume. A quick piece with sparse punctuation would be considered less intense than a slow piece with frequent punctuation, and pieces used to represent fight scenes in shadow puppet theatre or dance have multiple punctuation strokes per note of the main melody. Could this relate to the eruption cycle as well - the more noise and material shooting out of the volcano, the more intense the eruption? These particular connections are things about which I have not seen research, but I am very curious to know if this is real, or if I'm just overanalyzing. I suspect I'd need to speak/read Javanese to figure this out, so I may enlist one of my Javanist ethnomusicologist friends to help me dig, since the only Javanese words I know are directly related to gamelan.

I've been playing in the UCR Javanese gamelan for two years now, and I absolutely love it. I joined the group for purely aesthetic reasons - I loved the sound of the music - but the more I learn about the structure of the music and the culture behind it, I appreciate it more and more in deeper ways. The undeniable connection to geology in this music is an added bonus, but one that makes gamelan even more fascinating and beautiful to me.

And now, since I've been jabbering about this for a lot of lines, here's a soundfile of a gamelan piece. This is the group in which I play, from our 6 June 2008 concert. We're not Javanese professionals by any means, but our instructor and guest singer have been studying Java for decades, and we had a guest director come in from Yogyakarta to work with us. These are good people to have in charge. This particular piece is a ladrang, which has 32 notes per stroke of the big gong, and it is often used to open a concert.
Ladrang Wilujeng

I have not been subducted! I promise!

2008-06-06T00:25:00.000-07:00

With all the posts about the geoblogosphere expanding and going "mainstream," I feel even more guilty about not posting anything in two weeks than I would have anyway. I'm good at the self-guilt-tripping thing! I am sorry for not having read your posts all that carefully in the past couple of weeks!

One major reason for this is that, since my last entry on 22 May, I have played in eight concerts: three of Renaissance music (Tuff Cookie, I'm not going to bring the school's viol on a cross country flight when I head east this summer, but maybe I will haul it to AGU!), two of all-Russian orchestral music, one of bluegrass, one of student compositions (a piece that I composed was also on this concert), and one of music from around the world (in which I played mariachi, bluegrass, and Javanese gamelan). I still have two more concerts left before the end of the quarter, and this list doesn't include the ones from earlier in May.

This is a lot. It is making me exhausted - I do, after all, have other school work! But I think that if this were last quarter, it would be burning me out a lot more than it is. I'm sure the reason I'm not spontaneously combusting in all of this is knowing that, even though the music department still owns me until next Monday, this stuff is no longer my job. Finding out that I did officially get in to the earth science department after waiting so long to hear relieved a lot of stress on its own, but I didn't expect it would make such a difference in my outlook toward the rest of music school. With the ensembles, I can really enjoy them again, since they have no bearing on my academic future or career. That my attitude toward some of the more tedious groups improved almost immediately upon my receiving that acceptance letter tells me even more that I've made the right choice about switching majors. I'll be learning tons of things about a science that's always fascinated me (both now, in school, and in the future, through research), all the while preventing myself from completely burning out on music. Win win!

(The geology classes have also gotten me off my butt and out of my apartment a lot this quarter. That does not happen with music classes. Getting outside every weekend and stomping around on desert mountains has also, I think, been wonderful for my sanity. And not to mention for getting rid of some of the weight that comes from being a music major who never gets outside.)

And that got pretty rambly. I guess that's what happens when I write 12:30 AM blog entries after long concerts. I promise I will write more about actual geological topics soon!

Accretionary Wedge #9: Significant Geologic Events

2008-05-22T22:06:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the ninth (late night!) edition of the Accretionary Wedge, everybody's favorite geoblog carnival!

Today, 22 May, is the anniversary of the 1960 magnitude 9.5 Valdivia, Chile earthquake and its associated devastating tsunami, the largest ever recorded. I figured it would be an appropriate anniversary for posting a carnival of entries on significant geologic events, though I intended for the theme to encompass smaller and more personally-significant things in addition to (or, so it seems, in concordance with) the events that changed the world in some way.

What I didn't know when choosing today for posting was that the the Southern California ShakeOut Scenario, a hypothetical magnitude 7.8 rupture on the southern third of the San Andreas Fault, had today as its release date. This future event - because it is a when rather than an if - is already high on my personal list of most significant events, since fear of precisely this kind of thing got me into reading about things geological when I first moved from Virginia to California, and since that reading showed me why I have always had at least a background interest in the way the Earth works, and since that in turn lead to my whole crazy change of academic directions. This is one of the reasons the 1906 San Francisco quake fascinates me so much - that there will surely be reflections of it in what eventually happens on the southern San Andreas. I know more about the San Andreas now, its pattern of destruction is less mysterious to me than it was in 2006, and it will be a focus in my MS work, but this kind of disaster scenario still scares me. I'm hoping that, if it happens during my lifetime, it will be significant to me because of understanding and survival, not because it's my last geologic event. Yikes.

But enough about me. There was a prolific response to this theme, with discussions of events long in the past to events personally experienced, precisely the kind of response for which I hoped. Enjoy!

The Lost Geologist understandably has trouble picking a single most significant event, when there are things like meteorite impacts and global glaciations to consider, but he ultimately focuses on the personal realization that Everything is Interconnected.

Callan Bentley of NOVA Geoblog writes a kind of meta-Accretionary-Wedge post, considering two such formations, one west coast and one east. This comparison of California and DC deepened his perspective on his local geology, and highlight the message that Geology Repeats Itself.

Tuff Cookie, of Magma Cum Laude, is also a fan of subduction zones. The subduction of the Farallon Plate is fascinating in and of itself, but is particularly important to Tuff Cookie because it created Utah's High Plateaus, the stuff of which Senior Theses are made.

Living through a major earthquake, particularly if one came close to not making it through, is a scary kind of significant. Kim, of All My Faults Are Stress Related, has every good reason to reprise her Loma Prieta story from Accretionary Wedge #2.

Andrew Alden also has a chillingly cautionary Loma Prieta story in his Oakland Geology Blog, which describes how the Quake of '89 permanently changed the city of Oakland, and his personal connection with earthquakes.

Over at Geology Happens, the runoff from the Rockies is both a herald of spring and a show of the power of big water.

Despite her emphatic declaration that she refuses to pick one out of her set of pet geologic events, Green Gabbro's Maria focuses on the scouring of Fossil Gorge, a 1993 Mississippi River flood that exposed a 375 million year old ecosystem on the one hand, while engulfing hapless Iowan buildings on the other.

Hypocentre's post leaves the Earth itself, though not without taking a chunk of the planet along. He cites the impact that formed the Moon as being key to the development of the Earth's rotation, core, tides, and tectonics.

Silver Fox, of Looking for Detachment, also had some trouble narrowing the prompt down to a single event, or group of events. In the end, though, she cites the tectonic shaping of the American West, which in turn shaped her geological career and the place she calls home.

On a similar train of thought, Geotripper also had a hard time narrowing things down, but came back to the formation of the Grand Canyon as being an event that shaped a career in addition to a landscape. What a fantastic place for a first ever geology field trip, if I do say so myself!

Brian, of Clastic Detritus, is also taken with the American West, though in its Cretaceous wet stage, rather than its current desert state. He describes the Western Interior Seaway, the paleogeographic puzzle it poses, and the geological epiphany that puzzle-solving was for him.

Ole Nielsen, of Olelog, goes beyond the alteration of an entire city to the near annihilation of the Earth's entire human population. If the eruption of Mt. Toba had been any bigger, who knows if any of us would have had ancestors enough left to be sure that we would be here blogging today.

And that's all for this time, folks! Thanks for the excellent entries! Next month's wedge is, I believe, going to be hosted by John van Hoesen, at Geologic Musings in the Taconic Mountains, so keep an eye peeled over there for the next prompt and deadline!

Accretionary Wedge Reminder!

2008-05-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

I'm doggypaddling my way to the surface of the bottomless pool of end-of-the-quarter schoolwork with a reminder that posts for this month's Accretionary Wedge are due by 8 PM PST on Wednesday, 21 May!
I'll try to write in straggler entries as promptly as I can, but the more stuff that's in by Wednesday night, the better.

A reminder of the theme: I want to know what particular geologic event, no matter how small or large in scale, no matter how recent or ancient, is most significant to you as a scientist and an individual.

Emailing me, or commenting with links on either this post or the original one, both work fine for submission.

Virginia Earthquake

2008-05-07T22:50:00.000-07:00

My mom called me yesterday to gloat about the earthquake in Northern Virginia. She seemed so hopeful that she could tell me before I'd checked the USGS page and seen it for myself (which, in fact, I hadn't, since I was in rehearsal all afternoon), and so glad that she could lord it over me that there haven't been any noticeable quakes in Virginia while I was there.
"So, did you feel it?" I asked.
"No," she told me.
"And how big are we talking?"
"1.8."

As far as I was concerned, she lost all the gloating credibility at letting on that she didn't feel it, but the fact that people were feeling this 1.8 (it's since been upgraded to 2.0) at all really did surprise me. I didn't quite believe mom that people had actually felt it until I could get to the USGS site. In California, people don't feel the 1.8s. I'm not sure if it's solely related to the heavily fragmented and faulted nature of the rock here (versus the less pulverized stuff in Virginia) stopping propagation, or if there's also a factor of Californians being too jaded to small quakes to notice them anymore (versus people east of the Rockies who are maybe still twitchy about the 18 April quake in Illinois). Either way, and no matter how shallow the Virginia quake was (only 6 km down), 1.8 (or 2.0) is pretty small. I am impressed by how widely it made itself known!
The smallest earthquake I've ever felt (and, incidentally, the first I ever felt) was a magnitude 2.9. For all I get excited when I feel one that beats out my previous largest (which is, to date, 4.7), now I'm curious to see if I can beat my previous low in terms of magnitudes I'll feel.
(Speaking of feeling low-magnitude quakes, The Onion has an article on the matter... Also, I seem to like parentheses today.)

The USGS site also revealed that the epicenter of this quake was less than ten miles from the house where I grew up, and pretty much directly under my brother's school. There have been plenty closer than ten miles to where I live now, but there is no weirdness factor in that for California. "Right under my house" is not a place I like there to be earthquake hypocenters regardless of state, but "right under my house...in Virginia" would have an extremely high magnitude on the weirdness scale.

Callan and Tuff Cookie have already written more scientifically and eloquently about yesterday's Virginia earthquake. Read their posts if you haven't already!

Accretionary Wedge Call For Posts

2008-04-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

Though I'm sure everyone who reads this already knows full well about the Earth Day installation of The Accretionary Wedge and has likely already read it, I will declare openly and redundantly that people should still go check it out over at Andrew's blog.

For the next issue, I want to know about a geological event you consider most significant to you. That can be a historical event or discovery that pulls in your interest or a more recent event that directly impacted you on a personal level, something that inspires your research or something that changed your approach or results on some work in progress, or whatever else you wish to make of it.
That qualifier of "most significant" can certainly be on a global scale too, but that doesn't also certainly doesn't rule out things that might be completely unheard of to people not studying that particular aspect of geology. I'm most interested in the weight of any given event to you, as scientists and individuals.

I'd like to get the carnival post up on 22 May - the anniversary of the 1960 magnitude 9.5 Valdivia, Chile earthquake, the largest ever recorded. I'd therefore like to have all your posts by 6 PM Pacific time on 21 May, 2008. You can comment on this post with a link, or you can shoot me an email. I'll also post a reminder a few days before things are due.

Some paint about 1906

2008-04-25T00:54:00.000-07:00

Here's a painting I'd actually hoped to post on 18 April. Turns out it took far longer to finish than planned, due to fiddly detailed bits and also to schoolwork/fieldwork.

I probably should preface it with a little explanation, though. In 2002-2003, I drew a comic book/graphic novel/thing on the premise that the days of the year are personified, with their appearances and personalities based on what happened on that date throughout history. As new significant events happen, those appearances and personalities change. The original thing from 2002-2003 was pretty badly drawn, and focused on September 11th, as my way of coping with those events. In looking back over those drawings for the fifth anniversary of 9-11, though, I figured that it was a waste of a concept to talk about personified days and only really focus on one.

So I went on to April 18th, the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906, a date still very much commemorated for that reason, even though other things certainly have happened on it since. Here's the 16-page comic about April 18th that I drew last year.
The female character is April 18th, and the male character with the sinclines and anticlines on his face is meant to be the personification of the San Andreas Fault. Definitely got a lot of his character design from the Palmdale roadcut.
(That's a whole other story. A friend outright challenged me to figure out how one would go as a fault for Halloween. I did not even try to meet the challenge costume-wise, but this character design was the result on paper.)

And now this painting was this year's commemorative measure on my part:

I feel pretty good about this, particularly considering my usual artistic weapon of choice is markers. I'm kind of concerned that the colors emphasize the fire more than the earthquake, fitting right in with the kind of historical revisionism that gets me all ranty, but I've sort of justified it to myself by realizing that I have no way to know how much of the damage to that original building was caused by the quake and how much by the fire.

The reference photos for both this painting and the pictures of the devastation in the thing from last year come from an awesome book called After the Ruins: 1906 and 2006. Photographer Mark Klett collected a bunch of classic photos of the immediate aftermath of 1906, then went back to those locations in San Francisco and tried to frame the modern day equivalents of the buildings (or at least the same patch of space) in the exact way that the 1906 photos were framed. The facing pages, 1906 and 2006, speak of devastation and of thriving reconstruction all at once, and serve as a reminder of repeatable history. Considering I've monopolized the school library's copy of this book by repeatedly checking it out, I guess it's high time I spit out the cash for my own copy.

More than blue and green...

2008-04-21T23:13:00.001-07:00

"Keep our planet blue and green" is one of the Earth Day slogans I remember from the relevant events in which my scout troop participated when I was little. Celebratory banners presented an idealized picture of the globe in those colors, and participants in the event were given small evergreen trees in little pots to plant in the yard, for further promotion of greenness. I suppose blue and green were perfectly reasonable colors to be promoting for the environment in northern Virginia, where I grew up and lived until I was 18, and I really didn't think further into those color-based slogans when I actually paid attention to the holiday.

I didn't see a place to which those colors and the environmental generalizations associated with them really didn't apply until I moved to California in 2006. Sure, I'd seen pictures of deserts, but with those pictures also came the generalization that deserts are wide, flat except for sand dunes, uninhabited, uniformly brown, and full of enormous cacti. But seeing the desert in person - that was a whole different impression. I saw no cacti on my drive across the country, but there were strips and blocks of bare exposed mountains at nearly regular intervals, and I saw plenty of towns stuck in the middle of the sand, trying to be green and welcoming in an environment not so conducive to either.

And I think the colors of the desert are amazing. Brown is only a small part of the story. The palette of the exposed rocks can make the concept of a green swath of vegetation seem too monochromatic and boring. I'm currently taking a mapping class for which our field area is banded in greens, pinks, reds, yellows, creams, and even bright purples, all brightly contrasted against the blue of the sky. The generalized blue and green of streams and trees simply does not apply here, nor should it be made to apply. I have to wonder if the people living in those high desert towns get the same blue and green Earth Day slogans as the folks on the East Coast do, and whether it's deliberate or ignorant that they disregard the colors and characteristics of their local ecosystem in the process of constructing an unnatural environment by hijacking resources from their natural sources, far and wide.

But I digress. Plenty has been written about the development and deconstruction of the desert, far more knowledgeably and articulately than I could do. My point is partially that shooting for the blue and green of Earth Day posters is not the right idea for everywhere on the planet - but also that, while rivers and trees are indeed unique to Earth (as far as we know), the geology that lies underneath that layer - as may be exposed in the desert, for example - is just as unique to our planet and worthy of recognition and celebration on a day whose name suggests devotion to the entire planet.

Sounds of 1906

2008-04-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

In the course of compiling that playlist of earthquake-related songs I mentioned a few entries ago, I came across a handful of songs written in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. It makes absolute sense that with this, like so many other tragedies, reactionary songs popped up within days (if not hours) of the quake. These songs give an interesting snapshot of reactions and how they changed with time, as well as into musical idiom for addressing the public about significant events. I was able to find only sheet music for two of them, two with only recordings, and one with both recording and sheet music.

Interestingly, all five songs are in a major key, despite their images of flames, collapsed buildings, and dead bodies. As someone who has grown up playing music in the Western Art idiom, I was very surprised by this, since it's encoded in music from the beginning of tonality that, generally, major is happy and minor is sad. I would have expected a dirge or a lament. Instead, the songs are not only major, but have an upbeat/dancey piano accompaniment. It occurred to me, though, that the classical idiom is the wrong one from which to look at these. They are, decidedly, the popular music of 1906, and therefore express their feelings in a familiar and accessible - if not overdone - manner for the sake of the audience. It's not any different from that Columbine song written by two students of that school, or many post 9-11/pro-America songs - major key, moderate to fast tempo, nothing compositional (as opposed to lyrical) to distinguish them from any of the popular love songs with which they cohabit the airwaves. I don't know why popular music fell into the habit of major key songs about depressing topics - I'm sure ethnomusicological work has been done on it, or if it hasn't, perhaps it should be.

Four of the songs have words. The fifth, "Firemen's March," is for solo piano. Without the image of San Francisco in flames on the cover of the sheet music, the sound alone could be taken as any perky military (or civil, I suppose) march. The interesting thing about this one is that the cover of the sheet music also declares that the piece was actually composed on 18 April 1906, while the composer was sitting on a hill and watching the subjects of his piece attempt to save the city. To be frank, I think this guy is completely insane. Though the event surely would have inspired me musically (I actually am planning a piece based on it), I would have been sure to get my butt out of the line of fire before I started actually writing anything. I personally get very absorbed in the creative process when composing, and I wouldn't want to be lost to the world scribbling notes while sitting on a hill, only to not notice fire creeping up the back of that hill, or to have an aftershock drop something on me. The composer lived to have his work published, lucky that he was, but I don't think it makes him any less crazy.

The other four songs, for voice and piano, show how the public emphasis of the tragedy shifted away from the earthquake and toward the fire in very little time. The copyright dates on the ones with printed music ("The Stricken City" and "The Burning of Frisco Town") put them in April and May of 1906; judging by the title, I would place "Death Comes at Dawn" closer to the tragedy, and judging from the descriptions of aid in "San Francisco, Our Beloved, Arise," I'd place that one a little later on. The emphasis in the first three songs is on the fire, as was the government-pushed-for goal ("Earthquake? What earthquake? Our ground is safe! Any city can have a fire!") - the mention of the earthquake goes from one verse to one sentence to nothing at all between "Death Comes at Dawn," "The Burning of Frisco Town," and "The Stricken City." "San Francisco, Our Beloved" mentions both earthquake and fire in one sentence, then turning its attention to the important healing process - though hopefully not too soon to heal without learning from what did the breaking to begin with.

"The Burning of Frisco Town," "San Francisco, Our Beloved," and "Death Comes at Dawn" can be heard on this page, toward the bottom. Some lyrics have been modified to mention the date 18 April more specifically, and "Death Comes at Dawn" has been changed to "The Earthquake Came at Dawn," purportedly to "soften the image of the destruction." To me, that's a modern keeping with the revisionism that started in 1906 - if we say "earthquake," but say it as a way to cover the effects, how does that stand for how anyone will cope with the next big one? The San Francisco earthquake and fire were horrific things, both for what they did do, and for how much future is still in them. They should stand up and be retold as a cautionary tale. The old songs, with their denial and coverups, deserve to be played, along with the statement of, "This is how they coped. How will we?"

At Fault Road Trip, part two

2008-04-10T22:59:00.000-07:00

And now, after some delay, Part Two of the fault poking road trip!

Day Four - Parkfield, Carrizo Plain
Abby and I have been to Parkfield several times now, and considering the size of the place, we've pretty much covered our bases for tourism possibilities, particularly since the SAFOD site is not open to the public. We keep going back, though, just plain because we like it - we like how a town full of cattle farmers can still be so very nerdy, we like the full appreciation of seismicity (rather than the SoCal standard of being in denial about it), we like the quietness that comes with being nowhere near the freeway, and we really like the food (and wording of the menu) in the Parkfield Cafe. Not to mention everyone we've ever met there has been really nice. And really, what's a California Fault Tour without a stop in Parkfield?
We ate in the Cafe, then walked over to the bridge over the San Andreas, then went under the bridge, despite signs suggesting we not do so. We then returned to the Cafe with our own nerdy offering. Abby and I have compiled a lengthy list of songs that are either directly related to earthquakes, mention them, or can be construed to be related in the context of the other songs. We figured it would be more fitting to the atmosphere of the Parkfield Cafe than the dreadful soft rock station they had playing, so we brought a copy in. They said, unfortunately, that their CD player probably couldn't handle the MP3 CD, but they still wanted to thank us for the CD and printout of the track list...so they hung it on the wall of the cafe. For those who have not been there, there are all kinds of things lining that wall, mostly articles about Parkfield, maps of regional seismicity, photos of seismological equipment, and cattle farming equipment. We may not have contributed to the ambiance, but our nerdity is now part of the decor! A grand achievement, if I do say so myself...
We followed the directions in David Lynch's incredibly detailed Field Guide to the San Andreas Fault from Parkfield to the Carrizo Plain. This took us down a route called Bitterwater Road, which goes through Palo Prieto Pass and sits pretty much directly on top of the fault the entire time. There are obvious fault features along the route, from scarps to slumps to sags. At this time of year, with sufficient rain, there are also millions of wildflowers in bright blues, oranges, and yellows standing out from the grass. For all the evidence of tectonic torture, this landscape looks very soft when covered with such foliage. Since it's not a busy road, we stopped a few times for photography's sake.Wildflowers and fault features along Bitterwater Road.
We arrived on the Carrizo Plain late enough that we couldn't go explore yet, but still early enough to get a campsite. It was quite windy and chilly at night, but still vastly preferable to the climate in late June.

Day Five - Carrizo Plain
Some of the other campers around our site were members of a group called Desert Survivors, who were there for the wildflowers. They were very nice, and invited us to join them on their hike along Caliente Ridge. We declined, saying we had things to see on the other side of the plain. With this statement, we received general curiosity about what's on the other side. To think, they'd be coming to the Carrizo Plain, site of that ridiculously famous aerial photo, bordered to the east by the Temblor Range, and not know the San Andreas Fault runs through it? Woah.
Our first stop on the other side of the plain was Wallace Creek, another necessity for fault tours. Last time we were there, it was entirely too hot outside and the entire landscape was baked brown. This time, there wasn't exactly any excess moisture, but green was a far more dominant color in the streambed and the rest of the plain as a whole. After Wallace Creek, we went after the Elkhorn Scarp, AKA the Dragon's Backbone. We drove past it in June, but we didn't go through it, and it was way too freaking hot to poke around much anyway. This time, we had Lynch's book to guide us, though we had to follow it backwards since we were coming from the north. This dumped us onto some sketchy dirt road that, for a short while, ran in a dry creek bed. This creek bed crosses the scarp and the fault within it, and it did have some places where I had to turn pretty sharply, but I was concentrating on not slamming the car into a rock or falling into an indentation, and therefore did not actually look for more specific fault features/creek displacements as I was driving. Oops! The place where the road came out on the other side of the scarp did, at least, afford some spectacular views of the pressure ridge. We ate lunch while ogling the landscape, then headed back to camp.The Elkhorn Scarp, viewed from the not-so-sketchy part of the road.
We did decide to go up Caliente Peak after all, but we didn't meet up with any of the Desert Survivors, nor did we go far along the ridgeline, since we didn't want to have to go down the precarious road in the dark. Practically the entire plain is visible, from the white curved expanse of Soda Lake to the raised straight line of the Dragon's Back, to the open expanse patched with varied colors of wildflower. Absolutely beautiful.

Day Six - Carrizo Plain, Roads On Faults
The Carrizo Plain has some outcrops with American Indian pictograms on them, some of which are hidden, and some of which are touristy. The touristy one is only accessible by guided tour at this time of year, though, in order to not freak out the birds that nest there. The outcrop in question is weathered interestingly on the outside, but weathering has also taken its toll on the pictograms. There are some patches of red, white, and black painting still visible on the inside, but much is faded or completely bare. The meaning behind what's left of the paintings is unknown, as is the exact age. It was slightly surreal to be standing there looking at something so far removed from the modern world, both in media and in meaning.
We poked around in the visitors' center for a little while after the tour, before deciding we'd better get going if we wanted to actually see stuff while following the fault back down to SoCal. The main road goes very close to the Elkhorn Scarp, but I was still curious about what the inside looked like, since we'd missed it the previous day. At one point, a small dirt road turned off and looked like it went up up into the pressure ridge, so I was all AHAH and turned up it. It was narrow and kind of windy and high, but I was determined to find the fault! I did, admittedly, stop before the road went all the way up, but that's because it seemed like a good viewing point. The fault was not immediately obvious, since there were three narrow valleys within the pressure ridge, all of which made sense for it to follow. (Of course, if there were multiple fault strands, that'd explain a lot). I guess this is another case of things looking much more clear-cut from the air than from the ground, but I think I'd also need to poke around in this ridge more before saying that for certain.
From Maricopa, the first town you hit when exiting the Carrizo Plain to the south, we kept taking roads that sit on top of the San Andreas. These roads afforded spectacular views of colorful (and landslide-ridden) canyons and linear fault features; around the San Andreas' Big Bend, it went high enough into the mountains that there was still some snow on the ground. We went past the Fort Denial area, and pulled over to get some photos of the junction of the San Andreas and the Garlock, as well as some of the linear ridges and lakes that I saw from the air on the flight from Ontario to Monterey. Around this point, we passed through one of the burn areas from the October 2007 wildfires. It was truly eerie to be driving through a landscape full of twisted leafless trees, their trunks and branches mottled between their natural color and charred black. There was a sign in this part of the forest cautioning travelers about careless use of matches; I wonder whether the sign was put there before or after October.Burnnnn.
We also finally found the Neenach Volcanics - the other half of the Pinnacles - along this route. We'd definitely been looking too far north in June, but we also made the mistake of looking for stuff that actually looked like the Pinnacles. Far from it! Tectonic tilting protected the Pinnacles from weathering, but no such luck for the Neenach formation; it manifests as nondescript outcrops of andesite and rhyolite.
We kept following the San Andreas through to the Cajon Pass, with a stop for dinner in Palmdale (though it was too dark to see the infamous Roadcut). We pulled up to my building in Riverside at around 11 PM.

Day Seven - Not the Landers rupture
The plan for the last day was to go out into the Mojave Desert to find the surface rupture scar from the 1992 Landers earthquake, but the weather forecast said the wind out there was supposed to gust to over 50mph, and we weren't sure if we wanted anything to do with that. We brainstormed some plan Bs, but over brunch at IHOP, we decided to try our luck with the desert anyway.
Susan Hough's Finding Fault in California has directions out to the Emerson Fault section of the rupture, near the northern end, not hugely far from Barstow. These directions were clear up until the "after about seven miles, turn right on a dirt road with no street sign" part. Problem is, the area in which the rupture is supposedly to be found is full of off-roaders, who have made all kinds of trails and roads through the desert. There were a whole bunch of roads onto which we could have turned and still been in the "roughly seven miles" category. We went down about five of them, all said and done, and we didn't find anything. Immediately after the Landers quake, the part of the rupture we were trying to find was supposedly displaced laterally by 15 feet and vertically by 6 feet. That's an impressive scar! Naturally, it would have weathered plenty in sixteen years, but it's doubtful that it would have reduced to completely flat in that time - yet all we found was decidedly undisrupted-looking topography. The only reason we didn't keep looking down more of those dirt roads is the gas meter was telling us things were getting too low for more seeking of surface ruptures in proverbial haystacks or literal creosote fields. As we headed back, we determined that we'll go look for this one again sometime, preferably armed with GPS coordinates and equipment, as well as some more recent descriptions of what to look for.

And that was that for this trip! We're already discussing our next one - or two or three. We'll eventually drive as much of the Garlock Fault as we can manage, and we haven't gone east of the Sierras yet...

We interrupt this message for a brief announcement...

2008-04-07T13:14:00.001-07:00

Guess who's now officially accepted for a MS in Earthquake Physics?
Awww YEAHHH!

(Methinks I should not do a victory dance while in the music building. Also, now I need to figure out how to break the news to the department head and to my private teacher. I fear an explosive reaction from the latter. I don't think coming to my lesson wearing a t-shirt that says "SEISMOLOGIST" will work so well.)

We will return to our regularly scheduled field trip description shortly.

At Fault Road Trip, part one

2008-04-04T22:36:00.001-07:00

For those of you have been questioning (or celebrating) my absence, I assure you I am still not dead, and still have not fallen into the ocean. Unlike the last time I said this, I was away from my computer for good and relaxing reasons, rather than drowning in a pile of Western Art Music history and theory. For all of last week, Monday through Sunday, my friend Abby and I were traipsing around California in search of major faults. Naturally, we had a large pool of possibilities from which to pick our sites, but I think we chose good ones. We admittedly did this trip with more touristing than geologizing - we looked for offset sidewalks and signs of scarp, but took no measurements or detailed field notes (though I did keep a paper journal about it, and we both took gajillions of photos). Regardless of the mostly-nonscientificness of this trip, we still got called huge nerds for doing this over our spring break by a woman in a store in Hollister. Success!

Day One - Airplane, Monterey

At last, I get to participate in the Airliner Chronicles! This is the Garlock Fault and Tehachapi Mountains.

We started the trip up in Soledad, which is in Monterey County off the 101, and I opted to fly up there for the sake of time (and because the last time I did that drive, it resulted in the accident I posted photos of earlier this year). Turns out that the flight from Ontario, CA to Monterey is one that simply cannot be missed by people who like faults and geomorphology. In that short hour, one gets a fantastic (and different!) view of so many things that it would easily take days to get to it all by car. My seat was on the right side, and I could see the clear linear trace of the San Andreas from behind the San Gabriel Mountains to where it intersects the Garlock in the Mojave. I didn't quite get to see the sharp angle exactly where the two faults meet, but it was still clear they were coming to that end based on the slant of their respective mountain ranges. For a while, there was only Central Valley out the right, with the tips of the Sierras in the far distance, but I was able to angle myself so that I could get some really good looks at the Carrizo Plain out the left side of the plane. We crossed back so the San Andreas was on the right somewhere near Parkfield, which I am about 80% sure I saw out the window. On the descent, there was a really nice view of the Pinnacles. I took about 20 pictures out the window of the plane. Next time I make this flight, I want to sit on the other side!
After the flight, we took a nice hike on the old Fort Ord lands, which are built on relic sand dunes. Unfortunately, most of the rocks one finds on these trails are chunks of asphalt left over from the military, when they ripped up their roads upon decommissioning the fort, but it's still a very pleasant place to hike.

Day Two - Hollister, San Juan Bautista, Hayward

This house, in Hollister, has an unwanted guest named Calaveras...

Abby and I have been to Hollister before - we went during the summer, as part of another fault-poking trip. Thus, we'd already seen the craziness that aseismic creep has inflicted on the town. We wanted to see it again, to look for details we might have missed, but we also had the objective of trying to get the town to live up to some things. According to Wikipedia, as well as some other hits on Google, Hollister claims to be the Earthquake Capitol of the World. Parkfield, however, also claims the same thing, and Parkfield had t-shirts and bumper stickers to back up their claim. Hollister didn't seem to have anything to back it up the first time we went, so we searched more actively this time. Turns out that Hollister has officially dropped its hold on the title, precisely because Parkfield started having more earthquakes than Hollister did. We still were able to find some t-shirts with the old slogan, though, so we left happily.
After a brief detour to check out the Mission San Juan Bautista, which is built on a nice scenic hill with a great view, which also happens to be a scarp of the San Andreas Fault, we headed on to Hayward. Traffic was, for the most part, ok, and we got to our hotel with about an hour of daylight to spare. We chose this hotel (a Days Inn) because it was cheap and not gross, not for fault-related proximity, but we decided we'd try to see our first evidence of aseismic creep before darkness fell. Susan Hough's Finding Fault in California, which we consider something of an Indispensable Fault-Poking Guide, told us, with no great fanfare, that the fault was on the same block as the hotel. We felt the warning bells anyway, and a quick consultation with Google Earth and the USGS's quaternary faults overlay told us that the Hayward Fault was, in fact, directly on the other side of the wall, fifteen feet from where we were sitting. That's probably why the hotel was cheap! That explains the long narrow hill behind the building! Cue nervous laughter that went off and on for the rest of the evening. We found no evidence of creep on the hotel itself, though there was a deflected curb the next block over. Good enough for us to call it a night, after imploring through the wall that the fault be nice to us.

Day Three - Hayward, Berkeley, Crystal Springs Reservoir

The view into the Lawson Adit, Berkeley

After breakfast, we went on the "classic" aseismic creep walking tour of downtown Hayward. From this tour, it was immediately apparent that the city of Hayward tries hard to cover up what Hollister leaves plain for all to see. The Hayward Fault has a bigger scarp than the Calaveras, on which there are plenty of houses built, but the city has done a good job of erasing much of the creep. Rather than looking for bent and broken sidewalks, fresh new concrete is a better way for locating the fault. There is one curb, at the corner of Rose and Prospect streets, that has managed to escape erasure. My guess is that people fought for it to stay in its gloriously displaced state, since the other three corners of the intersection look freshly refurbished. The fourth corner, however, shows about a foot of offset. Apparently it's been there since the '70s, and someone occasionally puts a dated line across it as a makeshift creep meter. It will be a sad day when that curb gets fixed.
Another salient point of the Hayward walking tour was Old City Hall. This is a beautiful old building from the late 19th century that has the unfortunate position of being directly on top of the fault. It was maintained for a long time, but was finally abandoned for being structurally unsound in the 1990s. It still stands, slowly being pulled apart, as a sad symbol of what happens when people don't plan around what nature can do. Peering into the broken windows, one can see rows of cracks around pillars and in the ceiling, which align with an oft-patched sidewalk outside. There are also still remnants of more human things - a wooden mailbox for Santa in an otherwise empty room, and a wall covered with children's faded crayon drawings. I wonder if the kids who drew them, who were probably so proud to give them to their parents, know that the only audience for them now is the Hayward Fault. The front door of the hall only says that it has moved to a new location, not why the move had to occur. The cool thing about the new hall, though, is that it maintains some of the design elements - ornamentation, the way the lettering "Hayward City Hall" is carved into the stone - of the old, while still being a completely different looking structure. It's a nice fusion, and made all the nicer by a mural on the parking structure between the two halls, which depicts people carrying chunks of the design of the old hall around to the new one. Hayward, you handled it gracefully.
Our next stop was Berkeley, where we met up with none other than Maria, who was awesome enough to take a break from Thesis Hell to give us the Geek Tour of her campus. Like in Hayward, Berkeley generally does a pretty good job of hiding its faults, though there are some places that the Hayward Fault still makes itself known. The most famous example is the Cal Memorial Stadium, which is a pretty terrifying structure even without the whole aseismic creep thing. The outside is unreinforced concrete, and all the seats and floors in front of them are wood - all of which is wobbly, some of which is also rotting. I doubt this thing even needs something as significant as The Big One to bring it down. But there is also the fault, which, while it runs through section LL, shows huge creeping cracks in the wall and tilts in the foundation at section KK. You can easily see the parking lot through this hole. You can practically see San Francisco through this hole. After taking some pictures, we got the heck out of there, lest our magnitude of sheer nerditude bring the structure down. I think the stadium was also scarier than the view into the Lawson Adit, which was a late 19th century teaching mining tunnel that happens to also go into the fault, through its medieval-dungeon-esque door. The rest of the fault features were more subtle, in the form of a gently curving stream and some slightly bent streets. The rest of the geekery between the three of us was as blatant as two Wallace Creeks put together.
Abby and I left Maria to do her thesis, taking the scenic route back from Berkeley. We went over the Oakland Bay Bridge, though we could not tell which specific section had been Loma Prieta'd, then through the San Francisco Peninsula on I-280. This freeway passes through the San Andreas Valley, where the Fault was first identified and from which the fault took its name. We tried to pull over and take a brief walk along Crystal Springs Reservoir, which is a long lake along the fault, filled with water due to a manmade dam, but we went to the wrong parking lot and gave up, since we didn't want to be searching until it got dark. I did pick up some neat samples of serpentinite on this walk, though, and we did eventually drive past the dam on the way back to the freeway. We still made good time back to Soledad despite the detour.

Aaaand this is turning long. I think I'll cover the other four days in a second entry.

Impending Disaster (Movie)

2008-03-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

I'm getting to a point where I'll gladly go see anything Brad Bird directs, no questions asked. The Iron Giant was awesome in and of itself, then The Incredibles was wonderfully clever and well-done, and I thought Ratatouille was one of the best in Pixar's whole illustrious lineup of films. Therefore, when I heard that Bird is going to be directing a live action film, with Pixar possibly stepping in to handle some of the special effects, I immediately counted myself in for a ticket even without knowing the release date. I was all the more excited to hear that the film in question is called 1906.

As in, The Great San Francisco Earthquake And Fire Of 1906.

Even if I hadn't been sold already, that would've done it.

With no release date pinned on the film at the time (though it's since been slated for sometime in 2009), I figured I would check out the book on which the movie is to be based, James Dalessandro's 1906. It was a quick read - I was able to get through the whole thing on one cross-country flight. And, well. If anyone can fix it, I trust Brad Bird can.

The novel suffers from some problems that are unrelated to the geology of the characters' situation. For one, the main character/narrator is a definite Mary Sue: she knows everyone who's anyone in San Francisco, is involved investigating the mayor (even though she's only media), gets to be Caruso's personal tour guide, owns Jack London's old typewriter, and so on, all at the age of 23. Her cop/engineer/geologist-with-a-degree-from-Stanford boyfriend isn't really any better. There are also some problems with the first person perspective, since there are scenes described in vivid detail that there's no way the protagonist would have seen (I'm talking, scene on a train coming from Kansas, let alone scene in the bad guys' secret lair). The entire story is laced with very heavy-handed foreshadowing, to the point where I was thinking, "Alright already, just get to the stinkin' earthquake!" Sure, when you pick up a book or go to see a movie called 1906 with a picture of the burning Call Building as the cover/promotional artwork, you know the earthquake is going to be a major plot point, but I think there are ways such a story could be written so that the reader/viewer, when immersed in the world being presented, would still not see it coming at the precise time that it does. The unexpectedness of earthquakes is a large part of the terror in them, and Dalessandro completely does away with that aspect. Furthermore, none of the main characters behave like normal human beings when the earthquake finally does strike. It comes at a point where there is already conflict going on, and when the shaking ends, the conflict picks up exactly where it left off, as if nothing had happened. One would think that at least a couple of people in the situation would have been utterly freaked out enough by the city shaking down around them to forget what they'd been doing before, or at least lose their place, but nobody in the scene seems to even bat an eye. Maybe they read all the foreshadowing from earlier in the book.

But for these faults (har har), 1906 has a problem that makes it quite singular among disaster movies - it has too much science. You heard right. Dalessandro clearly researched the cultural climate of turn of the 20th century San Francisco - his setting is detailed and colorful and lines up with all the history books I've read about this event so far. And he clearly did some research on the science of earthquakes - there's even a scene where two picnickers on San Andreas Lake notices an alarming rate of preseismic slip along the fault. The problem is that Dalessandro didn't cross reference the two - that is, he didn't check to see how much of that science was known in 1906. Thus, you get characters who are part of the general nonscientific public talking openly about the San Andreas Fault by name, even though it wasn't named until Andrew Lawson's 1908 report on the 1906 event. And the scientifically-inclined characters describe the fault as a boundary between the Pacific and North American plates, a good sixty years before the theory of plate tectonics was presented. Not to mention that scene with the picnic at the fault - the reason the picnic is there is one of the people on it is a seismologist who is deliberately measuring slip on the fault, monitoring it closely due to its threat to the city in the days before the quake. There's nothing scientifically incorrect here. It's just all displaced in time by a matter of years or decades - a huge oversight indeed.

The character stuff, the reactions, and the foreshadowing are all things that I'm sure Brad Bird can fix, since he's apparently in the process of rewriting an earlier version of the script. His other movies are much more subtle in their foreshadowing, and the characters are all more realistic, multifaceted, flawed people (or robots, or rats). I just really hope it occurs to the movie team to check their science and update the script - or perhaps backdate it, as the case may be.

I still plan on seeing 1906 when it comes out. I'm sure it'll look awesome, since Pixar is, it has been recently announced, involved. The murder mystery/tale of scandal of the book is still intriguing, even with the all-too-perfect characters and all-too-obvious earthquake. If worse comes to worse, 1906 will be next in a long line of disaster movies that are so bad that they're funny, but I doubt that, since it is a Brad Bird movie. I'm really hoping I'll be pleasantly surprised, and will be able to enjoy the film in earnest, without having to snark at anachronism.

1906 on IMDB

You know, it would be fun if a bunch of geobloggers went to see this together. Yeah.

San Onofre Breccia

2008-03-22T16:41:00.001-07:00

I've pretty much managed to describe the entire field trip over the course of a few other entries by now, but I've been saying I'd post pictures for three weeks now, and I'm only delivering now. Eesh!

The weather looked pretty threatening the entire time, but there fortunately was no actual rain.

This is a section of the breccia from Laguna Beach; the clay matrix is redder at Dana Point. Only reason I'm not posting one of those shots is I'm not sure whether or not my classmates would appreciate being in my blog, particularly if I'm only using them as scale.

The San Onofre formation is riddled with a bunch of little faults, like this one. We also saw two or three buildings - one of which is a popular restaurant - that are directly on top of some of said faults. They manifest pretty clearly, so one would think builders would shift stuff a few meters out of the way, but nope. Perhaps The O.C. is too cool for avoiding faults...

This fault had one of its sliding surfaces partly exposed, complete with weathered slickensides. Though my finger is ostensibly for scale, I also could not pass up the opportunity to take "fault poking" (my term for merely visiting faults) to a whole new level.

Some of these faults, as well as other cracks/fractures were healed up with calcite.

This is a narrow crevasse/groove that is developing a druse of calcite. (The dead bug is not for scale. The groove in question is about two inches wide and several feet long.) Apparently the mineralogy class goes on this trip every year, and this encrusting of crystals was not there last year.

Seeing as all of the stuff in this breccia was spit out of a subduction zone, one would expect a bunch of spectacularly deformed metamorphic rocks. I thought this one was particularly awesome, since it has clearly been kicked back and forth between brittle and ductile zones several times. There are places where twisted and folded bands have been displaced across a clear break, but also places where a break with displacement across it has been twisted and folded in turn. It really is amazing how much can happen to one rock without its past history getting distorted beyond a point where it can be deciphered.

And that is it for this quarter's field trips. But I'm going on a week long fault-poking road trip next week (the Carrizo Plain is the longest stop on the itinerary), and I've been invited to go on some field trips for a class I'm not officially taking next quarter, so I am not doomed to spending too much time indoors!

Not Easy Being Green

2008-03-18T11:12:00.001-07:00

My internet connection was on the fritz all day yesterday, so I missed the best timing for posting a mysterious green deskcrop of my own. I'm still going to post it, though, since I'm not even entirely sure what it is. There was plenty of this stuff around at Dana Point Harbor, where my mineralogy class went for a field trip on 1 March. Even the professor wasn't sure what it was, so we collected some of it (and I very nearly spoiled the sample with blood after slicing my thumb on my knife trying to extract some of the green stuff) for analysis. I ran XRD on it, and one of my classmates put it under SEM...and we came up with completely unrelated results. My guess is the problem might have been in the preparation of the thin section for SEM, since this stuff has a hardness of less than two and powders so easily that I'm sure getting a clean even slice would be really difficult. We're going to put the powder we prepared for XRD into SEM after spring break, in hopes of clearing this up. But in the spirit of geopuzzles, I am consulting you guys, too! I'll let you know if your guess is what I came up with in XRD, or what my classmate came up with in SEM, though neither one is confirmed. I don't have any prizes to give, though I guess I could draw a silly picture for someone if they get it, or have a compelling argument for something other than what we tested.

There were a bunch of places where the mysterious soft green stuff appeared to form puddles in larger rocks.

In other places, the mysterious green mineral clearly followed the foliation of the rock; this was further supported when I was drilling out the green for the XRD sample - the drill bit went very deep into a tiny surface spot of material, but was still churning out green.

In terms of environment, Dana Point, in Orange County, is dominated by the San Onofre Breccia, which consists mainly of blueschists, with some greenschists and amphibolites, in a red clay matrix. Many of the rocks there show signs of being kicked back and forth between brittle and ductile parts of the subduction zone. I'll put a bunch more photos in the next post.

Shake Up != Wake Up

2008-03-11T17:14:00.001-07:00

The Inland Empire apparently had three magnitude 3+ earthquakes on Sunday night. I felt none of them, which I find disappointing, since it's been almost three months since the last one I noticed. I'm sure I would have noticed them if I had been awake, since I tend to notice even the 2.9s, and since I felt two 3.9s from the same area (near Devore) in May. I literally just missed these three, though - I went to sleep fifteen minutes before they happened, and was too exhausted to be woken up, even by the magnitude 4.0. I suppose that finishing the draft of my thesis on Sunday should have been satisfaction enough to make me feel less disappointed about missing these, but such is not the case.

I'm particularly disappointed, though, that my computer wasn't running to catch these. I've been alpha testing the Quake-Catcher Network software since the beginning of February, and I have not yet had a chance to see how it picks up a genuine earthquake or three (as opposed to the motions caused by cats named after faults rocketing around my apartment). Also, by having one less of the alpha test computers running at the time (not that I know how many were running), that's less data with which to test the collecting and analyzing part of the QCN software. I know one computer isn't going to screw it up all by itself, but since I'm trying to help test this thing, I know my computer will be more useful if it was turned on to pick up quakes, even if I'm not awake to feel them. I'm hesitant to leave the computer running 24/7 for the sake of my hard drive, but I may have to just not think about that.

Looking at this little sequence (4.0, 3.4, 3.2) and one from 23 May 2007 (3.9, 3.9), both centered in pretty much the same place near Devore, I have to wonder if there's a small asperity in the fault there. In both sequences, all of the events happened within a couple of minutes - if not seconds - of each other, without many aftershocks later. I admittedly don't know enough about fault mechanics yet to tell whether or not my thought here can hold any water, but it seems at least possible that in these sets of events, the rupture could start, be briefly paused by the little asperity, then continue after stress makes the asperity give way. Does this actually make sense? Now that there have been two little sets of events there, I plan on reading more about that aspect of fault mechanics once I'm done with my comprehensive exams.

Danger danger danger!

2008-03-05T16:06:00.000-08:00

Less than three hours after I posted lamenting how I have more photos of my car tempting the geological fates than of myself doing the same, the TA of my mineralogy class sent me this photo from this past weekend's trip to the San Onofre breccia at Dana Point, Orange County. (Entire entry about that trip coming soon.)

I laugh in your face, oh cautionary sign! How dare you try to thwart my efforts to poke the little bitty fault!

Off the freeway and into the fault trace...

2008-03-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

I've really been enjoying reading all of the death-defying stories that have been posted around the geoblogosphere of late (though I hope it doesn't make me a bad person for enjoying accounts of dire peril from people I wouldn't want to see succumbing to that peril). It becomes quite evident that having a death wish, or at least not fearing death, comes with the territory of being a geologist. But then, does not having field experience with potential mortality attached inherently mark someone as a newbie to the field?

I think it does, at least in my case. The most "dangerous" thing I've done deliberately so far is park my car on a bunch of infamous faults. When I tell my friends in Virginia that I've done this, they get pretty freaked out; presumably, they don't understand how slim the odds of the fault rupturing in the few minutes my car is on it are. (And even if it were to go off while my car was there, I told them, if the car is parked, that would likely mean I would not be in it in the time, so the odds of me getting strike-slipped in half are even slimmer. They seemed moderately relieved.)

Here, we have a bad cameraphone photo of my car parked on the San Jacinto Fault in San Bernardino.

And here is my car on the San Andreas (with its convenient street sign), also in San Bernardino.

And this is my friend's car (which is the same model as mine, only darker gray), which she parked on the Calaveras Fault in Hollister, promptly after I said, "You'd better not park right on the fault."

But for this silliness, I did have a very serious very near death experience involving a car on the way to some geological activities. I was driving from Riverside to Soledad to meet a friend for a week-long road trip along the San Andreas. Just after getting off the terrifying California state route 46 and onto the apparently-safer US-101, strong wind shoved my car partway into the left lane. The problem was that another car was coming in that lane, so I corrected abruptly to avoid collision. I did, indeed, avoid a run-in with that car, but it turns out that I corrected too abruptly and ended up spinning off the freeway and rolling down a 15-foot embankment. I landed like this:

Amazingly, I had no injuries other than a pulled muscle in my neck, and we were still able to go on the road trip in my friend's car.

I think that any person would take stock of where they were in life and what they wanted to do with that chance to keep living after an incident like this. But chances are any sane person would think, "I nearly died heading to a geological site. Is this the safest thing for me to do with my life?" But me, I thought, "That road trip was the best thing I could have done after the accident. This really is what I want to study."

So there's hope for me yet in terms of geologically death-defying photographs.

Pacific Silica Quarry

2008-03-02T23:43:00.000-08:00

I have neither died nor fallen into the ocean, though it kind of feels like the latter, considering how I feel like I'm frantically doggy-paddling to keep afloat in all the reading, composition, thesis writing, rehearsals, performances, and occasional field trips.

The field trips, of course, are the fun part. My mineralogy class has gone on two in the past week, to vastly different but equally interesting places. I'll address these in two separate photo-heavy posts.

Last week's trip was to Pacific Silica Quarry in Perris, California. It has been long abandoned in terms of industrial purposes, but it's still open to anyone who wants to traverse very uneven, cracked, muddy, and hilly roads (the TA drove - the professor seemed pretty terrified) in search of minerals. The quarry taps into what seems to be a pretty big granitic pegmatite (far far bigger than the ones I mentioned in the Box Springs - those were only a couple of inches wide). It has all of the expected minerals for such a formation, with the added bonus of large schorl tourmaline crystals cutting across the quartz and feldspar.

It also had some particularly interesting formations of biotite, in long narrow strips criscrossing the quartz and feldspar of the quarry walls in shapes that are reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy.

While there were a few assigned questions for the trip (mostly in the form of finding specific things and drawing them), a large portion of the time was allotted to simply looking around for interesting things. And, if I do say so myself, I think I did pretty well for finding interesting things. I found two big chunks of euhedral k-feldspar - neither is the entire crystal, but one has five very clear crystal faces, and the other has what appears to be an enormous carlsbad twin. I also found a piece of quartz with a bunch of angular impressions in it that were obviously caused by k-spar crystals growing up against the quartz. Nobody else found any feldspar samples comparable to these, so I felt pretty awesome about it. They are now sitting very proudly on my desk.

Here's the one with five clear faces. For some reason, though, it did not want to be photographed without blur.

And here's the one with the big twin. I haven't seen that narrow crystal face on any of the feldspar we've looked at in the lab.

This is the dented quartz. This picture shows only the biggest imprint, but there are a bunch of smaller ones on the underside of the sample.

Our TA found some tiny garnets on a piece of feldspar, and when we looked closer, we found a bunch more stuck in or next to the tourmaline. Though garnet is not weird for pegmatites, it apparently has not been documented in this particular pegmatite before - there was no mention of it on the USGS map we had for the site, and the professor said she hadn't come across mention of them after years of reading up on the area in preparation for taking mineralogy classes there. She encouraged us to contact the USGS about what we found. (I think she's a fantastic teacher, and stuff like this is one of the reasons. She gets students excited to find things, and holds up that what we do find is significant beyond the scope of a grade in a class.)

A non-mineralogical thing that made me excited about this site was the view. Standing at the top of the hill into which the quarry was blasted, one is afforded an amazing view, from the San Gabriel Mountains down to Mt. San Jacinto. It's a much wider and less-polluted view than from the Box Springs. I loved being able to follow the such long sections of the paths of the San Andreas and San Jacinto Faults by tracing my finger in the air along prominent features (complete with scribbly circle thing upon hitting Mt. San Gorgonio).

We also had excellent weather timing. It was clear the entire time we were poking around in the quarry, but started to drizzle as soon as we got back in the vehicle. Half an hour earlier and we might have missed the garnets, but it held out just as long as we needed.

What about 22 years before 1857?

2008-02-22T21:53:00.000-08:00

Plenty of people are curious about Parkfield. The 6.0 in 2004 simply leaves the question of when the next one will be, how it will relate to the timing of all the others. It's still an excellent place to look at high-magnitude repeating earthquakes, and probably still one of the best places to poke around for some hints toward the holy grail of earthquake prediction.

I think that stuff is interesting, and that these are good questions, but what really makes me go hmmm about Parkfield is what happened there before 1857. All of the lists that I've ever seen of major events there with the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, and that average recurrence interval of 22 years is calculated from there on out. But what about beforehand? Has anybody looked into this?

The SAFOD station is about getting current earthquake information from Parkfield, but has anyone done any paleoseismological digging at the site? That would be something I'd like to see. I don't know how well a 22-year recurrence interval would show up in cross section, since that doesn't give much time for new material to accumulate on the old break, but it would answer whether or not the same pattern was going on before 1857.

I've heard a theory that the whole chain of Parkfield events is still part of the Fort Tejon aftershock sequence. That's a tantalizing thought that would accommodate the increasingly longer time between the events. If paleoseismology showed that Parkfield was quiet before 1857, it could add credence to this theory - if they're not aftershocks, something about that quake changed the conditions to make them ripe for repeated earthquakes. But if not aftershocks, that brings up the question of what specific change initiated the sequence.

But if these regular 6-pointers were just as regular before 1857, what made them tick? Surely Parkfield's location between the locked and creeping sections of the fault have something to do with it, but how so? And why did 1857's quake get so much bigger? How many 6s do we get before the next Fort Tejon?

Once I'm done with my music thesis, this is a subject about which I would like to read more. I'm hoping I can find things addressing Parkfield's past when so much attention is given to its future (if any of you know of any good ones, please let me know!), but if there isn't much out there, that's a study that really ought to be done.

Apology

2008-02-21T11:00:00.000-08:00

My apologies for the assumptions and general vagueness of the previous post. It was pretty idiotic of me to talk about how my impression of things was different from the statistics, while not using real statistics to back up why I might have come to those impressions. Idiotic of me, and most definitely unscientific, which is not an ok way for me to be addressing things right now. I need to catch myself doing those things early on (or be caught on them - thank you, Maria and Kim!) before it becomes something that gets in the way of my work.

I hope, though, that for the lack of calculation, I at least didn't come across as being a prejudiced kind of idiotic. If, for whatever reason, I did, I'm all the more sorry.

Jumping on the gender talk bandwagon...

2008-02-21T02:09:00.000-08:00

I have to say that I was genuinely surprised by the statistics about women in the geosciences that have been posted across the geoblogosphere this week. All logic says I shouldn't have been surprised, I guess, since I've certainly heard people talk about how the hard sciences are a boys' club, how girls are socialized to not like science, and all those similar things. Logic says people would be making these points for a reason. Not to mention I've heard similar lame/pathetic/infuriating statements about "womanyness" (to steal Eric's term) and lower aptitude in other contexts. But I was still really surprised to hear it about the geosciences in particular, and it took me a little while to put a finger on why.

One of the reasons, I think, is the geoblogosphere itself. I found out about its existence from Maria, finally stopped being chicken about commenting thanks to an entry in Kim's, blog, got into a comment-conversation with Tuff Cookie almost right away, and so on. I guess, silly me, that I assumed the non-internet version of the field would have the same proportion of intelligent, knowledgeable, and articulate female scientists to whom a lot of other people pay serious attention that the blogosphere does.

Part of it might have been the people from whom I got information (or inspiration) on the earth sciences before I decided to apply to formally study it. When I was six and totally obsessed with volcanoes, I had a video of the National Geographic special about Maurice and Katya Krafft, which I watched constantly. Katya had just as much scientific input and daring in the field (and just as much of a deathwish) as Maurice. And far more recently, when I first moved to California and wanted to go poke the faults, the book I regarded as indispensable was Finding Fault in California, by Susan Hough (who I got to meet this week - more on that in another entry). Woman geoscientists and definite authorities, both. They gave me no reason to suspect imbalance. And on a much smaller authority scale, two of the three geoscience teachers at my high school were women.

And a lot of it definitely has to do with the department I'm involved with now (I'm going to refer to it as my department, even though they haven't sent me that official letter yet). The head of the department is a woman, for one, and while there are still more men on faculty than women, it's not a hugely skewed proportion. It's even more balanced among the graduate students. My department has also gone above and beyond in terms of gender awesomeness in that there is a pre-transition female-to-male transgendered student in the department, and everyone has been incredibly respectful and accepting of him. I know there's no further statistics in that regard in the Nature article, but it doesn't strike me as something the Old Dinosaur Boys would be fans of either.

So I had this pretty concretely formed idea that the geosciences were less gender exclusive than some of the other physical sciences. In a way, I guess it's good that I've had this buildup of situations and role models that made hearing the real statistics surprising rather than old news, but that doesn't come even close to making up for how unfair and imbalanced the field really is.

Geological Wardrobe

2008-02-16T22:24:00.000-08:00

Despite its stratigraphic errors, I ended up ordering the Threadless Geology shirt. I put very little energy into my wardrobe except where geeky t-shirts are concerned, and I tend to design most of my own geeky t-shirts. I get really excited when I come across one that I didn't make, since it means that there are other people whose sense of geekery is on the same wavelength as mine. I'm not sure whether I should wear it on a music class-intensive (expected comments: "omg u nerd") day or a geology class-intensive (expected comments: "wtf nonconformity?!") day first.

On the topic of clothes, though, my geek sense sometimes gets the better of me. I was admittedly very very confused the first time I saw someone wearing clothes from Hollister Co.. "That town is famous for something other than aseismic creep?" I thought. Followed by, "Why is Hollister advertising surfing stuff when it's kind of inland? And San Benito County really isn't SoCal..."
Eventually, I remembered to look it up, only to find out that the clothing company has nothing to do with the Calaveras Fault's tromping grounds. This made the geek sense sad, even though it did not stop being amused by all these people making inadvertent seismology references.
But the geek sense is also a curious sense, seeking others on its wavelenght, as I mentioned before. I've therefore asked a few of the seismologists on faculty, and a few of the other grad students, if they can see people sporting that brand name without thinking of aseismic creep. To my glee, everyone I've asked makes the same instant connection that I do.
Which meant it was project time:

(Lest you assume I'm actually decent at sewing, I used clear thread on this precisely so nobody could see how the stitches might as well be a ball of string after my cats were done with it.)

This may mark the only time I buy blatantly name-brand things: to modify them for greater geek cred power. Booyah.

Slow global warming - stop earthquakes!

2008-02-15T18:19:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday's journal club was something of a milestone for me - my first even semiformal presentation on a scientific topic since high school, and for an audience of people who already have degrees in (or have already partly completed degrees in, at least) seismology. Journal club is laid back and conversational and not for any sort of grade or credit, which really gave me no good reason to be worrying about it, but I was worried nevertheless.

My job was to summarize seismological happenings in Nature since December, of which there have not been very many. Of the two earthquake articles I found (there was also a volcano article, which I did not realize was fair game until after the presentation), I went a little more in-depth on one summarizing an experiment simulating stick slip events in fault gauge particles using glass beads and low-frequency sound waves. The experimenters built a rig that applied constant stress to the beads, and could apply pulses or prolonged sounds if desired. Without the sound waves, the recurrence interval and stress drop of the stick slip events was constant and predictable, but as soon as one pulse was thrown into the mix, the recurrence interval became unpredictable and the stress drop fluctuated more. The aim was to try and see how a bombardment of long-distance seismic waves across an unrelated fault triggers new quakes, and to see if there was any pattern to it that could be used for the sake of predictions. There was no pattern, and I had a few questions about the method (such as the size of the beads, or whether or not the direction from which the pulses came made a difference on the results), but the consensus of everyone at the meeting was that these were valid questions that hopefully were covered in some supplement to the article somewhere, since these things really shouldn't have been left out.

And it turns out that worrying was, as I should have expected, not a thing I needed to be doing. People asked questions after I was finished, which answered as best I could, and then there was some further discussion of long-distance triggering. It didn't seem to be any more or any less discussion and questioning than after anyone else's presentation that I've seen so far, and one of the faculty told me it was a "very good kind of unremarkable," and that I would have definitely been told if I'd screwed up. Now that I know I've done well once, the next time should be easier.

The other person who presented last Thursday chose to focus in on a paper dealing with carbon dioxide released from faults during large earthquakes. The theory is that there is enough friction in larger quakes to melt a small amount of the rock in the fault, which releases gas. I thought it was an interesting article, but the way the title was worded made it sound like a disastrous global-warming-related phenomenon. I forget the exact wording, but at first glance, it seemed like the article might actually be some far-fetched thing about how faults, when just sitting there, are spewing greenhouses gases. I was glad that was not the actual content, but I have to wonder if the title was carefully formulated to grab attention in a time when global warming is such a focus. It was also certainly good for a long string of "stop plate tectonics" jokes, though we all agreed that volcanic emissions should be targeted for reduction first...

Igneous Sounds

2008-02-11T23:58:00.000-08:00

As requested, here are the five "igneous sounds" I came up with for my computer music class. There was an actual "composition" that used these sounds, but it was the kind of thing where the professor said, "Take five minutes to turn those sounds into a piece," and I chucked the things into the sequencer in somewhat random order. I was amazed that the professor liked it as much as he did, since I kind of thought it was crap. But here are the five component sounds.

Granite
Quartz left channel, frequency 500 Hz
Orthoclase right channel, frequency 200 Hz
Entire envelope played at one cycle per minute

Granodiorite
Plagioclase left channel, frequency 600
Quartz right channel, frequency 150
Entire envelope played at one cycle per three seconds

Diorite
Amphibole left channel, frequency 200
Plagioclase right channel, frequency 800
Entire envelope played at once cycle per ten seconds

Gabbro
Pyroxene left channel, frequency 180
Plagioclase right channel, frequency 120
Entire envelope played at one cycle per three seconds

Peridotite
Olivine left channel, frequency 400
Pyroxene right channel, frequency 600
Entire envelope played at two cycles per second

Considering the pace of the seminar, I doubt I'll get to use these again in the actual class, but if there'd ever be a reason for me to write a non-assignment electronic composition, sonifying geo-geekery would be a darn good one. I have some further sonification ideas percolating for the patches we've been given to work with this week, so I may have some different stuff to show soon.

Adventures in Sonification

2008-02-10T18:39:00.000-08:00

I'm taking the last of the seminars required for my music MA this quarter - a class in computer music composition, as in Serious Art Music rather than just how to use midi or how to create the kind of electronica that's actually popular with listeners. This is really not a type of music I enjoy aesthetically. No matter how interesting the theory may be behind it, or how well the composer may write about his own piece, most of the pieces I've actually heard from this genre (and all of the ones we've listened to in this particular class) just haven't appealed to me, or have made me really want to turn the music off. (The ones I want to turn off, coincidentally, are the ones the professor declares as particularly beautiful to his ear.)

But for this seminar, I have to write that type of music. It makes sense, I suppose, as part of a thorough education for an academic composer, but it still wasn't appealing to me even when I thought I was going to be an academic composer. Yet at the same time, there's something liberating about being required to produce music in a style I know I won't want to listen to - I end up stressing over the sonic outcome less, which gives me more of an opening to mess around with concepts that are intellectually appealing (read: geeky) and not have to dismiss any of them for not sounding like I'd hoped they'd sound.

The way the assignments have been going so far is that the professor gives us a pre-constructed patch in a sound synthesis program called Max/MSP, and we have to tweak the parameters to produce different sounds from that patch, which we then record and toss together into a brief piece. Last week, the main patch we worked with involved drawing sound envelopes onto a grid, picking a speed and amplitude, then running a sine wave through it.

Last week also happened to be the week when our mineralogy class got the tour of the department's various microscope facilities. Coming from spending time the previous night drawing squiggles on the envelope grid in Max/MSP, the graphed output from powder diffraction looked an awful lot like some of those sound envelopes. The next course of action for the music homework seemed obvious.

So, I made five very basic "igneous sounds" (granite, granodiorite, diorite, gabbro, and peridotite). The patch only had two overlapping envelopes, so I couldn't include every mineral in each rock, only the two predominant components. Max/MSP gives you the option to program in very specific points on the envelope, so I could have made exact matches between the powder diffraction graph and the envelope, rather than drawing in an approximation as I actually did; the reason I didn't go exact is because I knew the professor would take all of two minutes to look at it, so time that could have been spent on specificity here was better spent elsewhere, such as on actual mineralogy, or on my thesis. I based the envelope amplitudes on the percentage of that mineral in the whole rock (for the "granite" sound, I set the amplitude for the "orthoclase" envelope at 500 and the "quartz" envelope at 200), though I experimented a little bit with how to show the percentages (the "diorite" sound had the "plagioclase" envelope at 170 and the "amphibole" envelope at 120). I didn't have any rhyme or reason, though, for the amount of time I told the program to take to play through the envelopes. I varied those because the professor assigned us to make sounds of different lengths. Now that I think about it, I could have determined the speed based on viscosity, or I could have differentiated based on speed of cooling, playing the felsic envelope quickly for rhyolite and slowly for granite.The rhythms created by the overlapping envelopes were pretty interesting, particularly for the slower sounds, and the pitches turned out surprisingly consonant/tonal. (Too consonant for my professor's taste, it turns out. He remarked on how "harmonic" it was, then made the next week's assignment involve only unpitched sound.)

I came into the first meeting of that music seminar wondering how I might be able to bring geological stuff into those assigned compositions, and I'm pretty pleased with how this tweaking of envelopes worked out. All the more incentive to try and come up with further ways to do so, as I learn more computer music techniques, not to mention more about the science I'm trying to portray with those sounds.

Meet the Faultcats

2008-02-03T13:09:00.000-08:00

So, Callan Bentley at NOVA Geoblog posted an incredibly cute picture of his feline lab assistant, which has inspired me to share photos of my own fuzzy seismically-inclined monsters.

This is Andreas:

He knows what he's named after, and he clearly feels it is his responsibility to learn as much about that namesake as he can.

He's had these tendencies from a very young age:

(Andreas and his five littermates were born in my apartment this past summer. Their mother was a stray that I took in, not knowing she was pregnant. The mommycat and four of the other babies have since been adopted, but I decided to keep Andreas and his brother Garlock. He's three weeks old in this photo, and he crawled onto the computer all by himself.)

While it's cute to see Andreas studying, it's not the most opportune thing when he decides to read the same thing I'm reading while I'm reading it.

Garlock has similar studious tendencies, though he seems to have taken more to ethnomusicology than to the earth sciences. However, he is afraid of my camera, so I have many fewer pictures of him in general, let alone while he's "working." This is one of the better ones (Garlock's the black one):

(The Siamese on the right is Jacinto, who is, believe it or not, part of the same litter as Andreas and Garlock. Guess what the other three kittens were named.)

The Tsunami and the Whale

2008-02-02T21:45:00.000-08:00

Now that I've pretty much caught up with the load of work on which I procrastinated even more than usual due to last weekend's concerts, I can get back to interacting with the internet rather than just lurking. At least for the time being...

I have two weeks of Journal Club to catch up on here. Both of these weeks involved several people doing overviews of recent journal contents. This broke with the alternating schedule of small papers one week, big paper another week because the professor scheduled to present the big paper had a conflict. This meant I couldn't use reading the seismology paper as an excuse to further procrastinate on the electronic music homework, but it also meant more of an overview of recent research that I'd like to be reading but don't have the time for just yet, no thanks to the impending thesis and comprehensive exams.

The main paper we looked at this week dealt with small earthquakes only, which seems to be a relatively unpopular thing to write about. It makes perfect sense that people would want to focus on the Big Ones, since those are the events that effect society at large and that totally redo the stress balance on a fault system in one fell swoop, but the catalog of hard data (rather than historical description of effects) doesn't really include many of these for any given region. But there are plenty of small ones, and I'm sure there are plenty of studies that could be done on small ones that don't just relate them to big ones. The particular focus of the paper we looked at on Thursday was direction of slip (as in unilateral versus bilateral) and how that effected aftershocks. The largest quake discussed in the paper was a magnitude 4.1, which put most of the aftershocks into the unfeelable range. Looking at a few isolated 4-ish quakes, there did seem to be a correlation between directivity and aftershocks, with unilateral quakes having more aftershocks, which were mostly located within 70 degrees of the rupture plane. Bilateral quakes had fewer aftershocks in a less-confined space. The final example in the paper was a cluster of high-3 low-4 quakes up in the vicinity of the Calaveras Fault and at a pretty deep depth, and that's where the model got a little tricky. Whether each event in the cluster counted as an aftershock of the largest event previous to it or whether the ones close in magnitude counted as separate events was unclear, but those of us in the discussion agreed that the way these events were considered would make a difference in the conclusions. Furthermore, it seemed like the people conducting the study were inconsistent in what they treated as an aftershock versus a separate event, and it looked suspiciously like they might have done this to fit into the 70-degree angle measurement. We all agreed the paper would have been much stronger without the example of the cluster, both for the consistency thing, and also because a different configuration of stress is needed to set off a cluster versus an isolated event and its aftershocks.

Out of all the papers summarized last week, the one that was most interesting to me looked at postseismic slip between a mainshock and a large aftershock. I don't remember a huge number of details about the paper(people go through papers quickly during summary weeks - I've been thinking of asking the person who picked this one where I can find the whole thing), but it focused on a series of events in Japan. The study found a substantial amount of postseismic slip after the mainshock, directed toward the eventual location of the aftershock. These events went down the subduction zone rather than along it. I have to wonder what implications, if any, this observation would have on a creeping strike-slip fault. Could a rupture starting ahead of a creeping section and moving toward it stop where the creep starts, speeding up the rate of creep in the hours following the quake, and eventually set off another event on the other side of the creeping section? I'll definitely be looking to see if there are papers about this.

The other main paper we looked at last week had to do with inferring the size and shape of the area of seafloor displacement in a tsunami-generating earthquake by looking at the tsunami waves and inverting the data. I wasn't quite clear on how this worked based on the brief explanation in the discussion, but it was still a memorable discussion due to an amazing mental image. The professor explaining the paper was describing how DART tsunameters work, and how, unlike buoys, they're stuck to the ocean floor and won't pick up water column changes from surface/storm waves. "Only tsunamis set these things off," he said. "Or if a whale died and fell on one, that might do it, too."
Whale + tsunameter. Is that not fantastic? The mental image kept popping into my head all weekend, even at such inopportune times as the dress rehearsal for the concert (it was all I could do to not crack up). With such persistent visual thoughts, there was really only one thing I could do:

(I'm aware the big wooshy splash thing should be coming off of the whale's whole body. I just became aware too late to undo the coloring. Bleaugh.)
I think I'm going to give the original copy of this to the professor who made the comment, since it's all his fault.

Warning: music content!

2008-01-27T22:27:00.000-08:00

This weekend, I had an opportunity that increasingly fewer people get over time - to have an original composition of mine performed by a full symphonic orchestra. The more instrumentalists any given piece calls for, the harder it is to pull the necessary people together for a performance, and many orchestras know their programs at least a season in advance and have little interest in unsolicited scores by trying-to-make-it composers. This is why I feel extremely fortunate that the conductor of the university orchestra in which I play viola asked me if I'd written any pieces that the group could play.

I had exactly one piece. Every single one of my other pieces is chamber music - far more practical in terms of getting things performed. The only reason I'd written an orchestral piece at all was that the conductor of the non-music-major orchestra where I went to undergrad said, "If you write us a piece, we'll play it." I wrote the piece in the course of about ten days in 2005, and to cut a long story short, the orchestra for which it was written didn't play it after all. I was devastated at the time, and set the thing aside as a lost cause, but I was glad to dig it back out for another chance at a performance.

The rehearsal process was quite stressful, between bad intonation and gaps in the woodwind and brass sections that weren't filled until the week of the concert. But for all the things that went wrong in rehearsal and could have continued to go wrong, I ended up with two very solid and energetic performances, and a very positive response from both the audience and the orchestra.

I was pleased with how it went and glad that I had the opportunity, but at the same time, I never got particularly excited about the performances. I felt surprisingly indifferent about it for much of the rehearsal cycle, and barely told anyone that it was happening. I think this was in part due to the fact that I can write (and have written) better pieces than that one, and that it's not really the most representative piece for my whole body of work. But I also know that a lot of this detachment comes from my knowing I'm not continuing in that field after this year. My questioning the institution of Western Art Music and the role of the Academic Composer has been a long process, but the real paradigm shift (and the realization that I really didn't enjoy being in that field, and decision that I actually wanted to switch to formally studying earth science rather than casually observing) happened this past summer. This was the first performance of one of my compositions since then. If anything, the stress of the rehearsals only emphasized my feelings of not wanting to do this anymore.

I think I did a good enough job of acting the part of the capital-C Composer for the weekend, though. With all sorts of orchestra members, friends, and audience people I've never seen before in my life coming up to me and saying things like, "You must feel so proud," or, "I loved your piece," or, "Let me know when something else of yours is going to be played," I couldn't exactly tell them, "Actually, I have decided I don't want to be a professional musician and would much rather compose for fun, without pressure, deadlines, or institutional expectations," or with, "I spent about two thirds of the time I was playing the piece thinking about what would happen if the San Andreas Fault ruptured during the show." I just thanked them graciously and smilingly. And I really was glad that so many people liked it, and that the performance went so well. It was by no means a hateful experience, just an uncomfortable one.

Particularly uncomfortable were the questions of, "What are you going to do after you get your Master's this June?" I was able to dodge the real answer to this one by saying that I might be going to Java this summer; I didn't want to say I'm switching academic paths in favor of seismology, most prominently because I still haven't received that official letter yet, and there are people in the music department that I'm not planning on telling until I have that letter in my hand. Not to mention it might not be the most appropriate revelation to make right after such a musical success. I tried to explain how I was feeling to one of the bass players in the orchestra (who happens to be a physicist), and he kept telling me how I should stick to it through periods of disenchantment and find a thing in the study of music to latch onto and make it fun again, because he thinks I am a Natural Musician and a Good Composer and he likes playing my stuff. All very kind words of genuine encouragement, and then I would have felt like I was shooting him down to say, "I really don't want to find something to latch back onto in this field, and I'm planning on studying seismology instead, because it interests and excites me far more as an academic field and career path." And I also felt that if I'd said that, people would have tried to convince me not to - attempting to discourage me from a decision about which I really feel good because they liked a piece I wrote several years ago.

I also really don't like that I'm feeling so down over this right now. It really was a good performance, and it's not a bad piece either. Right after we finished playing, before I had to actually talk to people about the thing, I felt really truly happy, and that I had indeed accomplished something to be proud of. It's not something that's even slightly making me reconsider my decision to switch fields, but it's definitely the kind of thing I'm glad to have under my belt before that switch officially happens.

The Nevada Beachfront

2008-01-22T19:25:00.000-08:00

When I told my friends on the East Coast that I was moving out to California for grad school, many of them responded with comments like, "Please move back east before California falls into the ocean," or, "Be sure to buy a life vest once you're out there!" When I explained in turn that there was no such danger, illustrated with highly-technical sliding of hands past each other to explain the term "strike slip," most of those friends then told me that I was taking them way too seriously on their comments. One, however, still told me not to jump on the San Andreas Fault, just in case.

The fact that this came up in casual conversation with so many people, even on the East Coast, is only a small sign of how pervasive this misconception is. It's become a part of pop culture even more than it's something people actually worry about - well, I certainly hope it's more pop culture than genuine belief, but that would be a hard thing to gauge, and my circle of nerdy friends is probably not the best place to calculate such things. A quick Google search for "California fall into ocean" reveals all too many sites, some of which are those user-asks-question-another-user-answers database sorts of things, which assert that a big splashdown is imminent (this makes one wonder about the credibility of the other information on those question sites). And friend of mine did tell me recently that one of his relatives moved out of California after Northridge and bought a map with the supposed new West Coastline of the United States. One also has to wonder if that map was drawn as a joke, or if the mapmaker is hoping to use those funds from the maps to move away from the supposed sinking slab.

In some ways, the concept of the entirety of California going down doesn't seem too far fetched. This is, after all, a state that routinely has hundreds of square miles catch on fire, where even a moderate amount of rain sends people out sandbagging to curb any neighborhood-demolishing debris flows, where even not-The-Big-One can pancake high rises every decade or so. Not to mention those extremely-poorly-placed beach clifftop houses that do tend to surf the mass wasting events and wipe out in the water. It doesn't seem strange at all that an active imagination used to seeing such stories on the news might extrapolate to an even larger-scale disaster. No matter how much that thought may worry the imaginer, it only becomes truly troublesome when the actual science that disproves the myth gets ignored.

The California falling into the ocean myth actually predates much of the science that disproves it. Though I haven't been able to find any specific date or single source for the origin of this misconception, I have seen references to it in relation to the 1906 San Francisco quake. Following that temblor, all sorts of exaggerated "news" stories wired across the country, including one that the strong shaking had brought the ground under San Francisco down along with the city's buildings; this story quickly expanded to encompass all of California going under. When the San Andreas Fault was eventually blamed for the temblor and mapped out as extending through most of the state, the potential for more earthquakes and the clear line of breakage could have only fed the thought among the non-scientifically-inclined.
(This leads to a sub-misconception. Every version of the story I've seen cites the San Andreas as the line on which the break will occur, but many seem, well, shaky on where the Fault actually is. Some put it as the geographical line that separates California from Nevada. A great many other retellings of the story say that Los Angeles in particular will be swimming with the fishes, with no particular mention of San Francisco, San Diego, or especially not San Bernardino going along with it.)

The best way to fend this one off is, I think, better geology classes earlier on in school. None of this waiting until 12th grade to take a senior “slacker class” business – that’s more than enough time for the conspiracy theorists to get to someone. I don’t think any basic part of this misconception is too complicated to explain to someone in, say, middle school, if not even earlier.

But for all I hope people stop actually believing that California really is going to break off at the San Andreas Fault during a major earthquake and fall into the ocean, I would be sad if the idea faded away from the silly pop culture side of things. Without this myth, there wouldn’t have been those gloriously terrible sequences at the climax of the 1978 Superman movie, in which Lex Luthor implodes the Carrizo Plain section of the fault (highlighting another Faults Don’t Work That Way myth), then Superman flies inside the magma-ridden(!) crevasse to fix it, prompting the exact same footage of the collapse to be shown in reverse. Nor could that popular “End of the World” flash cartoon (NSFW for four-letter words) have gone quite as far with the silliness as it did. And this story has also prompted its fair share of songs, from Tool’s angry-good-riddance "Aenima" (also language NSFW), to Cass Elliott’s happy-good-riddance "California Earthquake", and the more obscure LA-based Little Girls’ perfect parody on SoCal surf tune style "Earthquake Song". Once people can recognize misconceptions as nothing more than that, why not have fun with them?

Box Springs Mountains

2008-01-20T22:52:00.000-08:00

The Box Springs is not a large mountain range, but its location, not its size, makes it a fairly prominent feature in inland southern California. It juts up in the middle of the Inland Empire, separating Riverside from Moreno Valley from Loma Linda and Redlands, about halfway between the San Bernardino Mountains, separating suburbia from the desert, to the Santa Ana Mountains, beyond which lies the alternate dimension that is Orange County. It is not a particularly unusual range compositionally, consisting mostly of granite and granodiorite, with some diorite, that was uplifted by faulting. It is a good place to introduce people to igneous rocks in the field (all of the Geo1 classes here go into the Box Springs for one lab), and it has some nice examples of granitic pegmatites and of weathering by lots of wind and not much rain.

The Box Springs also happens to be the backdrop to our campus, marked with a huge concrete yellow C that's a common destination for hikers when the weather is temperate. Considering that the street on which I live goes right up to the base of the mountain, there's really no excuse for why I've only gone up a couple of times. A couple of my friends from the Javanese gamelan ensemble in which I play felt like going hiking today, so we headed up there - only my third time ever.

Today's hike pointed out what I personally think might be the most geologically interesting thing about the Box Springs - the view. Because the range is fairly central, on even a moderately smoggy day (but not a day on which the whole region is on fire), one can see many of the large scale features of the area. The San Jacinto Fault runs through the Box Springs, so looking down the length of the range (and following that same line to the northwest, past the last peak) shows the location of that fault. Looking north from the big concrete C, there's a fantastic view of Mt. Baldy, the highest point in the San Gabriel Mountains. At the base of those mountains, one can see a little bit of alluvial fan patterning before suburbia encroaches on the slope. Looking in this direction, the notch of the Cajon Pass, where the San Andreas Fault pulls the darker San Gabriels past the fainter San Bernardinos, is also clearly visible. From here, looking to the west shows the line of the Santa Ana mountains, with the Elsinore Fault tracing along their base. On the loop of the trail we took that went between two of the peaks, we got an excellent look at the San Bernardinos and their San Andreas straight base from the Cajon Pass to where one of the Box Springs peaks blocked the view. There were some other trails heading down around that peak that we didn't take, but I'd like to go down that way some time, since I can at least hope that the whole straight section until the fault hits the San Gorgonio knot could be seen from up there.

(I'd post photos, except none of them came out terribly well due to distance and encroaching smog. Bah!)

I tried to refrain from going on and on about how awesome I found it to be able to see all these major features in panorama from the middle, since I figured not all ethnomusicologists or composers would find this as exciting as I do. But as soon as one of my friends' attention was pulled in by the shininess of k-spar in a pegmatite, and as soon as she asked me what it was, all bets were off, and I kept pointing things out. The comment that, "I had no idea this stuff could be so interesting," was all the reason to keep talking.