Martin Schwed

July 28th, 2010

Let me start by saying that I'm in the dark... Not figuratively- the people in the lab today decided to be "environmentally friendly" and leave the lights off. It's quite soothing, actually, and I'm surprised it hasn't put me to sleep yet.

My "seismology" playlist has evolved over the course of the summer. It has shifted from Frank Sinatra vs Notorious BIG to NPR podcasts (planet money and wait wait... don't tell me), to top 40 hits (those got old really quick), and now to more mashups. I'm currently listening to October's Very Cold, a Coldplay and Drake mashup album. Most of the songs are quite busy, but its a nice break from listening to just Drake. I've also been listening to The White Panda albums, which are more upbeat mashups than what I'm used to.

This new music has been helping me progress through hours and hours of envelope functions in search of tremor. I feel like the "t" and "0" keys on my keyboard (which I use to make picks in SAC) are going to wear out, I've been using them so much. Mike gave me a new set of hour-long seismograms to look at, and I've found a lot of signals that look like "classic" tremor (if there is such a thing), this is reassuring, although it means I have a lot of picking to look forward to.

Since I don't have much else to write about, I wanted to share a picture from field work in the Pacific northwest: 

This was probably the most satisfying moment of the whole trip- all the instruments were in pink boxes ready to be shipped to PASSCAL.

July 15th, 2010

I found myself enjoying Katy Perry's "California Gurls" while out in the field last week, but I still think the Beach Boys had it right all along:

That is all. Back to making pics in SAC.

July 14th, 2010

Field work in Cascadia started out really well. We flew out to San Francisco last Monday, where Rob picked us up from the airport. We then drove to the car rental company to find that they were closed for the holiday, although we had a reservation made for that day. That may have set us back a day, but it gave us the opportunity to walk around San Francisco and enjoy some great Brazilian food in Berkeley. The next day we were at the rental company bright and early to pick up a 24 foot truck, and two pickups (which we ended up having to go to another location to rent). By noon we were on the road heading north, and I caught the Uruguay/Netherlands game on the radio (sad day). We made it to southern Oregon and decided to spend the night there. The rest of the week consisted of splitting up into two teams and driving around removing broadband installations. It involved a considerable amount of manual labor (lugging around 50 lb batteries was definitely the highlight) and driving (more than 2000 miles of it). Instead of boring you with specifics, I’ll list some highlights:

If you have to rent a truck, insist it be four wheel drive. I almost became the third intern (by my count) this summer to get a truck stuck. It was around midnight, and we were trying to get one last station out before heading to a hotel. Said station was at the bottom of a hill, and we didn’t feel like lugging the aforementioned 50 lb batteries up to the truck. I was almost convinced that the truck (a nice big Dodge Ram) would have no trouble getting back up the hill. Since I had read two blog posts about stuck vehicles, I decided to give it a try at the top of the slope. Conclusion: It took us 20 minutes to get the truck back up 10 feet to the top of the hill. We left some nice holes in the grass too…

If you’re ever installing stations and need to put up a fence, please don’t bury T-posts 3 or 4 feet into the ground because you’re having fun with the post driver. I spent over an hour digging a 2 foot hole in the ground to get a T-post out, and was still unsuccessful. The best part- this fence was to keep a dog out.

Angle grinders are cool to use, but not ideal for cutting the top part of a vault off. We had a power inverter to use the grinder with the 12-volt batteries at the station, but we ran into problems every time. At first the power inverter’s wattage was too low, then we bought a new one and found that the grinder couldn’t get through the vault all the way, then the power inverter stopped working… lesson learned: use an ax. It’s much more effective, and great for relieving stress built up during field work.

We got to spend our last night in San Francisco. All I’ll say is that I now know all the cool places to hang out at near the Moscone center during AGU. I’m looking forward to it already.

All in all, field work was a great experience. It may have had its tough times, and I may still be sore all over, but I got to be outside, explore parts of the country I had never been to, drive a big truck, and just plain have a good time with the people I was working with.
 

July 4th, 2010

First of all, happy 4th! I’m looking forward to some pretty fireworks in uptown Oxford tonight!

Work in the lab has stayed pretty much the same for the past couple of weeks, except we’ve had less and less soccer interruptions as the World Cup winds down (Uruguay is in the semis!).

I was reading my old blog posts this weekend, and decided to reflect on my “Goals” post from the beginning of June (which has disappeared now that I edited it…), in which I said my goals were:

First third of the internship: Learn about the general structure of subduction zones, and how it relates to fault behavior.
Second third of the internship: Learn how to locate tremor sources.
Final third of the internship: Analyze the patterns of tectonic tremor in the study region (Alaska subduction zone).

To be honest, I surprised myself while looking over these, as I have already accomplished (and then some…) the first two goals, which were supposed to take me approximately six weeks. I don’t think I accomplished them with superhuman speed, it’s just that I overestimated by far the amount of time it would take to get into the swing of things.

I’ve even managed to turn that stupid bell in SAC off- it was driving me crazy for a few days, and for some reason I put up with it, not knowing it could be disabled!

I already have a few GMT maps of the study area, with several possible tremor source locations on each. It was nice to hear from Mike that I’m locating tremor more or less where he expects it to be, so I know that I’m not doing something completely wrong.

I leave for San Francisco tomorrow morning with Pat and Devin, two of the grad students in the lab. There, we’ll meet Rob for a week of removing seismic stations in northern California, Oregon, and Washington. I’m looking forward to some field work as a break from sitting in a lab looking at seismograms for extended periods of time. Hopefully we’ll be able to sneak in long lunches to watch the semi-finals, third place game, and final during the trip, which would make it even better (my Uruguay jersey was the first thing I packed).

I leave you with some firework pictures I took last night. Or not... I don't think the site likes pictures anymore. I'll use this as an opportunity to advertise my flickr site (I hope that's ok): http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinschwed/

June 22nd, 2010

If you haven't been keeping up with the latest developments in South Africa, you missed Uruguay beating Mexico 1 - 0 in the last game of the group stage! Uruguay will move on to face South Korea (2nd place in group B) in the round of 16. This hasn't happened in a looooooong time, so I'm pretty excited! Mike wasn't so happy, because he's a big Mexico fan, and their second-place finish in the group stage means they'll face Argentina, a real soccer powerhouse, in the next round.

I'm really getting into the swing of things in the lab now, even though SAC likes to be annoying sometimes. I've gotten through several hours of pre-processed seismograms from 50-ish stations in Alaska looking for tremor. Basically, that involves looking for relatively long-duration low-frequency events, that are recognizable across several stations. As I said in my last post, "repeat that [more than] several times- you get frustration". However, it is getting better: I've been getting more comfortable using SAC, and better at picking out possible tremor signals from the large dataset. 

I've got my "seismology" playlist down, and that has helped too. It's a mix of the standard pop stuff you hear on the radio, and a lot of mashups, that the rest of the interns already know me for. The latest one I've been listening to has been a mixtape with Frank Sinatra and Notorious B.I.G.. I acknowledge this is an unorthodox mix, but it sounds so good! It's great to have a catchy background beat with which to navigate seismograms in SAC.

June 16th, 2010

I worked pretty hard today on a tutorial one of the grad students put together for finding sources of non-volcanic tremor, that is until I announced to Mike (that's what I'll be calling Dr. Brudzinski from now on) that I would be taking an hour and a half break to watch Uruguay take on South Africa in the group stage of the World Cup.

The game was one of the best I've seen Uruguay play in a long time, and it was satisfying to see them beat South Africa 3 - 0, with two goals from Diego Forlan, an outstanding offensive player.

But now back to the science:

The tutorial I finished today involved looking at automatically-processed data from seismic stations in northern California (where I'll be in a few weeks!) in order to pick out seismic activity associated with non-volcanic tremor. I had to pick peaks of seismic activity that were visible across several seismic stations, and then check my pics against a model, using a series of scripts, to ascertain my error. From there, I would go back to SAC to modify my picks, and check them again. Repeat that process several times - you get frustration, and possibly a well-constrained tremor source location on a pretty-looking GMT plot. (I am still not comfortable with GMT, and probably won't be for a while, but at least it no longer scares me). I ended up locating 14 events, with reasonably good constraints, I hope.

So today was probably my best day so far, not only because of the thrilling soccer game, but because I actually felt semi-comfortable with what I was doing. Hopefully both of these great things will continue throughout the summer.

Here's another pretty picture from the orientation:

N.B. For those of you that are curious as to why I care so much about soccer, and the Uruguayan team in particular: I was born in Uruguay, and therefore am basically obligated to love the sport, and be a huge fan of my nation's team

June 13th, 2010

I'm finally back in Oxford!

The IRIS workshop was a great experience. One of the plenary sessions was devoted to tremor and slow slip - it got me very excited to start working on tremor around the Alaskan subduction zone.

For the last two poster sessions, I felt a lot more comfortable asking grad students and professors to explain their research, so I learned quite a bit about a considerable breadth of topics, including some basic concepts that I feel I maybe should have remembered from my geophysics class...

During the drive from the Dayton airport to Oxford, Dr. Brudzinski asked me if I wanted to go to Cascadia for a week or so to take out some seismic stations that have been out there for a while. Of course I said yes right away, so I get to spend about a week in the region with some grad students from Miami and Rob!

June 10th, 2010

After an intense but informative week with all of the interns in Socorro, I headed back to Ohio - here's the thrilling story:

The last few interns at New Mexico Tech and I left for the Albuquerque airport at 8:15. My flight to Chicago was supposed to leave at around 12:30, but it was late coming in, so we didn't board until 1ish. Once we were all on the plane, one of the flight attendants announced that it had gotten too hot for the plane to take off full, and asked 5 people to volunteer to stay in Albuquerque. After half an hour of beckoning, they got the five people they needed. However, the temperature "surprisingly" continued to rise (remember it was about 2 in the afternoon... I don't know how they don't have this sort of stuff in mind), and they needed five more people to stay or else they couldn't take off. We ended up taking off more than two hours after the scheduled departure time. As we were approaching Chicago, the pilot came on the intercom (everybody on the plane groaned- we were sick of the bad news) and told us that we had been put in a holding pattern, and that we didn't have enough fuel to land in Chicago. We had to land in Moline, IL for a fuel stop. Obviously, I missed my connecting flight in Chicago, having arrived three hours late. The United Airlines customer service reps were not the most accommodating, to say the least, and since the delay was "weather related" (stupidity related) refused to pay for dinner or a hotel. I ended up booking a hotel near the airport, and having dinner at the spaghetti warehouse with some people I met on the shuttle, which turned out to be the high point of the day.

The next day I flew to Cincinnati, and drove up to Oxford from there. I stayed in Oxford for two nights, and then flew to Utah (where I am now) along with Kristen, Dr. Brudzinski, and some grad students from Miami U for the IRIS Workshop. 

The workshop has been really interesting so far, the talks have been really diverse (I really like when they bring in the economic aspects of earthquake-related mitigation, as it bridges my two fields of undergrad studies rather nicely), and the poster session - well... let's just say I've needed help from grad students or Dr. Brudzinski to decipher some of those.

We stay in Snowbird until Saturday, and I start doing some serious work back at Miami U. on Monday. I'm pretty excited to be honest, the IRIS internship orientation and this workshop have gotten me pretty pumped to start locating tremor, even if it involves some daunting signal processing/programming/GMT.

I didn't bring my camera to Utah, but figured I should post a pretty picture from the orientation, so here it goes:

I'll share some sort of overview of the workshop when I've had time to digest it all - maybe this coming weekend.

June 4th, 2010

For my summer internship, Dr. Brudzinski has a very clear set of goals in mind for me.

First third of the internship: Learn about the general structure of subduction zones, and how it relates to fault behavior.

Second third of the internship: Learn how to locate tremor sources.

Final third of the internship: Analyze the patterns of tectonic tremor in the study region (Alaska subduction zone).

I feel like I already know at least a little about subduction zones and related fault behaviour from various geology classes and a very brief primer from Dr. Brudzinski last week, so hopefully I can tackle this first objective relatively quickly in order to move on to the other goals.

The orientation week in Socorro has been really useful as an introduction to various areas of seismology and their associated tools/software. However, I feel as though I have a lot to learn about the technical aspects of tremor location and seismic data analysis in general. The possibilty of having to program in languages I have never had experience with is the most daunting (the last time I did pseudo-serious programming was senior year of High School - with java), but hopefully Dr. Brudzinski's online unix-based tutorials will give me a push in the right direction.

I leave for Ohio tomorrow, and then I'm off to Utah for a conference. I'll be back in Ohio - and hopefully post again at the end of next week.

June 1st, 2010

After a hectic few weeks at the end of the semester, I'm finally in Socorro, along with (almost) all of the other interns, extremely pumped to to learn as much as possible about seismology.

So far we've had a fun time, struggling - in a good way of course - with seismographs in the field, hiking through the desert, and getting a few super-condensed primers on IRIS and seismology in general.

I'll surely be updating soon- Michael is making us stop now...