Nicholas Mancinelli is a student at U. of Notre Dame currently completing his research at U. of Colorado, Boulder under Anne Sheehan.
I am assisting Dr. Anne Sheehan from University of Colorado, Boulder with the Bighorn Arch Seismic Experiment (BASE). The research in the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Arch of northern Wyoming and southern Montana uses geological investigations of surface geometries and geophysical imaging of 3D crustal and upper mantle geometries from an active/passive seismic experiment. The resulting 4D (3D spatial and temporal), lithospheric-scale model of foreland arch deformation tests current hypotheses for basement-involved foreland thrust belts both in the Rockies and in active orogens of Asia and the Andes. We would also like to define a seismological signature characteristic of mine blasts. I primarily focus on the installation and servicing of the 180 short period seismometers that densify the Transportable Array. I will also be assisting with the surveying and deployment of the 1600 "Texan" seismometers programmed in both active and passive modes. I will be closely collaborating with Will Yeck and Zhaohui Yang to conduct a preliminary noise analysis of the array using PASSCAL Quick Look X (PQLX), thereby comparing and contrasting mountain stations with plains stations and L22 seismometers with 40T stations. See http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/sheehan/projects/bighorns/index.html for details!
I came home from Wyoming yesterday. Field work was a blast (no pun intended). We worked hard and played hard. Met lots of new people... professors, grad students, volunteers. Best summer of my life. I will have to spare the details for now, things are really hectic getting packed for school and all, but expect updates as I sit down to write my abstract and make my poster during the next few weeks!
I've been back in the field for about a week now. The days have been long and there is SO much going on. There are at least 60 people up here involved in the field work and each day is crazier than the last. We were disappointed to find that several of the broadband stations flooded during a big snow melt a few moths ago. We managed to replace a few of them, but we were slowed drastically by malfunctioning Clie's, hordes of mosquitoes a flat tire, and an overheating car engine. We don't have very much time to fix the waterlogged broadbands because loading the shots is taking up everybody's time. Two days ago we spent all afternoon loading batteries into the Texans, a monotonous but meditative activity. To boot, Anne is having me deliver a talk this evening to the PASSCAL crew and the KECK students regarding my research thus far in comparing the different sensor types!!! And tomorrow is our first day of Texan deployment!!! When you've got 2 days to deploy 1600 geophones, it's definitely crunch time.
Maybe you'll be glad to hear that I'm not going completely crazy. After dinner we play basketball almost every night until the fireflies start to flicker and sometimes we go for early-early morning jogs. The Milky Way is so bright at night that I can clearly see it without my glasses. The guys I'm working with are high energy and like to stay fit, so the few hours I have to myself I spend fast asleep. Wish me luck, its gonna be a busy few weeks!
Since I arrived in Boulder two and a half weeks ago, the sun has been brightly shining every day. Since I started working in the lab I have fallen into a routine. I wake up, drive to the lab, and, after responding to the new email in my inbox, process data until noon. I have set aside my afternoons for study and research; I have been making my way through signal processing texts, UNIX tutorials, and noise model papers. Before heading home, I usually spend a few minutes tossing the disk outside with the grad students. As I am commuting from Denver, my afternoon drive is often long, slow, and frustrating. But today's rainy day breaks the monotony.
I would like this entry to be a tad more personal as I revisit the goals I set one month ago. The goals I set for the first two-thirds of my internship are copy and pasted below:
1st Third
-Attend IRIS workshop in Utah, learn how to use program that will be used in the analysis
-Come up with a 30 second summary of my research, so that I can explain the goals of the Big Horns Array Seismic Experiment (BASE) to a geoscientist or a member of the public, work on my handshake
-Learn what life in the field is really like
-Get to know the research team
2nd Third
-Be able to lead a team to deploy seismometers (complex access ??)
-Be able to perform data downloads and QA/QC
I believe that I have achieved all of these goals more or less. I am further along with the data processing that I would have predicted, but I still have little background knowledge about the receiver function technique that Will is using. Perhaps I will ask him to direct me to a text.
The goal that I most neglected (despite Michael's comment on my earlier post) was the 30 second summary of my research project. Where five weeks ago I had struggled to speak for 10 straight seconds about my project, you would now be lucky to shut me up before 10 minutes. I have done so many tasks related to different facets of the BASE project, that my project is difficult to summarize so succinctly. Currently, it seems to be an amalgamation of loosely related tasks.
I am going to set a new goal right now, one that will refocus my efforts amidst the multitude of mini-projects that I have been tasked with. My new goal is to write an abstract that summarizes the work I have done so far in addition to creating a presentation that organizes and explains the figures I have made.
I will hope to have this done by end of day Friday, for Will and I will be driving back to Wyoming on Saturday to do the active source!
Ever since Anne got back on Monday the lab has been bustling with activity. A Ph.D. student is defending his thesis next week, so he is practically in the lab 24/7. The whole crew is getting excited to return to Wyoming for the active source experiment next week. Between Anne, Zhaohui, and Will, I have had plenty to work on. Anne is having me use Google Earth to zoom in on Transportable Array event cluster to search for mining activity. Hopefully Steve can use some of these mines as shot points. I am also working with some of Zhaohui's old GMT scripts. Trying to reverse engineer the scripts to suit my purposes is easier than starting from scratch... or so they keep telling me. Yesterday, Will and I made a a perl script that characterizes mines near the Bighorns by its daily blasting time. At this point, I prefer perl scripting to c-shell scripting.
Today, Anne is having me spend the day researching different instrument types. Part of my project is to compare the short period 40Ts and L22s with the broadband CMG3Ts. I am also still waiting *cough* for Brian Terbush to email me info about the geophones that Kate will be using during the active source.
I have also spent a lot of time looking through Wikipedia articles on poles and zeros, transfer functions, complex variables, and laplace transforms so that I can better understand how the waveforms are generated. My understanding is that the system response can be completely defined by a set of poles and zeros, along with a gain coefficient. Lots of crazy math, but that's why I signed up for physics ^_^
In other news, I lost 10 cents betting on Portugal yesterday. And I still have splinters in my left palm from fieldwork. Other than that, life is good. I will be leaving CU this weekend to go to my cousin's wedding in Kansas City. Fun stuff
Today is my second day in the computer lab...I have just successfully created my first broadband station Probability Density Functions (PDF's). Took all morning for the CPU to churn through a few months of data for only one station. The CPU will process 4 more stations overnight. Zhaohui keeps giving me papers to read while I am waiting for the data to process... Lots of papers on ambient noise characterization, low noise models, high noise models, PQLX methods... PQLX's save feature keeps causing PQLX to crash so we had to dig out some old c-shell scripts. my favorite one "extracts the statistical curves"... we even fixed up one of Zhaohui's old GMT scripts. pretty plots on their way!
It has taken me almost a full week to arrive at Buffalo, WY, where I will be stationed for a majority of my fieldwork. Dr. Steve Harder--a man of few words who is in charge of the active source seismic component -- drove me from Salt Lake to Rock Springs, WY, where we met up with the driller. We stayed the night at Motel 6 which--to nobody's surprise--much resembled Baca. The next day we drove drove to Shell where I was dropped off at an old Japanese internment camp that has been transformed into Iowa State's Geology Field camp. There, I met Dr Kate Miller's PhD student, Lindsay, and the rest of her crew.
It is still snowing hard in the high mountain passes of the Bighorns. The snow and rain is keeping us from installing the rest of the short period seismometers and the driller refuses to take his rig on snowy roads. Hopefully the weather will improve during the coming weeks.
I spent the night at Shell with Kate's crew and the next morning I woke up to find Steve Harder at our doorstep. He was supposed to be in Buffalo. Less than 2 hours after dropping me off at Shell the day before, Steve's Ford F150 had gotten stuck in a snow drift 8 miles from the nearest camp ground. For dramatic effect, note that there is no cell phone service in the Bighorns. As the story goes, Steve spent an hour silently sitting in his car thinking about his options. He finally decided that it would be best to stay the night in his car and walk the 8 miles in the morning, where he could catch a ride back to Shell. By the time he arrived back at camp, only 2 of us were still around, and it took us half of the day to dig his car out. We actually didn't dig his car out... two fisherman that had a truck and a tow cable happened to be driving along that road and dislodged Steve's car within minutes. A job well done.
We celebrated with burgers and malts at Dirty Annie's--the local diner, deep fryer, gift shop, rifle auctioneer, liquor store, and burd turd retailer. And I must say those were fine malts.
I finally left Shell for Buffalo about 24 hours after I had arrived. First passing through Worland, we took the southern route through the range... a foggy, sleepy drive. But I made it, I finally made it to Buffalo.
I am still in shock. I don't really deserve any of this -- A swanky hotel room looking up the snowy slopes all to myself when only 10 days ago began my seismological education. The 2010 IRIS Workshop is being held here at Snowbird Resort, about 45 minutes drive from Salt Lake City. My advisor, Anne Sheehan, picked me up yesterday from my house in Denver to make the 9 hour drive to Salt Lake. I must admit that I was somewhat intimidated to be spending so much one-on-one time with a professor, but I was pleased to find that we had many things to talk about during the drive--skiing, Ireland, and (of course) geophysics. My advisor seems to really care about getting undergraduates involved in research, which was something I had a really hard time getting involved with at Notre Dame. In my experience, professors rarely want to spend the extra effort to give the unexperienced, well... research experience. Anne seems to be enthusiastic about getting me involved--each day she gives me new project ideas.
Today I attended a workshop on PQLX. The program is a great tool for analyzing seismic databases, but unfortunately I couldn't get the MySQL server to run on Anne's old Mac. Most of the workshop participants were well experienced--in fact I recognized many faces from PASSCAL--I learned a lot about PSD's and different sources of manmade and natural noises. Hunter and Pnina were telling me how much more time consuming it is to create PSD's via Matlab scripts. Hopefully Zhaohui can get the program up and running so that I can use it in this summer's analysis.
So far Anne has given me a few ideas for my project:
-A background noise analysis on the broadband stations (with PQLX)
-Use Google Earth and the seismic records to pinpoint active mines within the array
-Determine the orientation of various seismometers by examining the polarity of the p-wave arrivals for the Chile earthquake - Feb 27
Things are still moving really fast. I should be doing field work in Wyoming by the end of the week. I expect life's pace will slow down a little bit once I get there.
After rereading the Big Horns project summary, I was pleased to find that I now understand so much more after orientation week. But I still have a long way to go...
1st Third
-Attend IRIS workshop in Utah, learn how to use program that will be used in the analysis
-Come up with a 30 second summary of my research, so that I can explain the goals of the Big Horns Array Seismic Experiment (BASE) to a geoscientist or a member of the public, work on my handshake
-Learn what life in the field is really like
-Get to know the research team
2nd Third
-Be able to lead a team to deploy seismometers (complex access ??)
-Be able to perform data downloads and QA/QC
Final Third
-Create a quality project out of the post-survey data processing, be able to access and utilize IRIS data, create a map with GMT
-Have a better idea of what graduate programs to apply for
This crude breakdown is not necessarily chronological -- my schedule this summer is largely dependent on the logistics of the experiment. I may be doing the data analysis in early July before the bulk of the fieldwork. My goals will become more concrete in a week or so, once I have a better idea of my summer schedule.
When I got back home from Socorro earlier today, I put my dusty clothes in the laundry and drove to the bookstore. The IRIS orientation was enough to inspire me to put down 35 bucks on a GRE study guide. Yep, I've decided to take the GRE in September. I'm still at the non-committal stage, but I'm feeling fairly serious about it at this point.
3 Overall Goals : By the end of this experience I would like to
-Be able to explain the geology of the Big Horns to a geoscientist
-Create a quality project
-Find compatible grad school advisors / programs
Tuesday, Day 3 of IRIS Orientation Week
Orientation week going well. Learning a lot about geology. Socorro and the surrounding area is full of interesting geology. We installed seismometers yesterday in small teams. We were faced with a few unexpected problems -- a bum sensor and a defective solar panel mounting -- but we managed to get it installed eventually. Looking forward to installing many more in the coming months as part of my work with the Bighorn Array.