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.)
Showing posts with label scec. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scec. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Saturday, October 11, 2008
SCEC Day Five
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?
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?
Thursday, October 2, 2008
SCEC Day Four
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
SCEC Day Three
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.
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.
Friday, September 12, 2008
SCEC Day Two
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!
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!
Saturday, September 6, 2008
SCEC Day One
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!
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!
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