...and then two more.

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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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!