Lizzie Abbott

August 13th, 2011

Before I fly home today, I'm spending part of my last morning writing this last blog post.

This week I did a lot of things, modifiying my cross sections to cover the clusters I could see based on epicenter locations and then began making time vs. magnitude plots of the earthquakes in each cluster in order to look for potential relationships between time and the magnitude Antelope estimated for each event  for the clusters of events (for example, a mainshock-aftershock kind of relationship, an earthquake swarm, etc.).  For some events, Antelope either couldn't or wouldn't calculate a magnitude and recorded it as -999. This confused me for a really long time because I was missing chunks of events from databases Mike had definitely run through the program. But we figured out we could still look at the temporal distribution in comparision with earthquakes Antelope could find a magnitude for, so we made each -999 earthquake magnitude between .1 and .9. Lastly, yesterday, I turned in my key to Mike's lab. Crazy!

I think I accomplished a lot this summer. I definitely learned a lot more about computers - I can use Antelope well and have learned how to use GMT pretty well too. I think I have a much better grasp on things to think about when doing research too. I've made a lot of progress with everything, really, and have a much better idea of what it means and what it takes to do research. I'm excited to move forward on this project throughout the semester so I can make a great poster for AGU. AND I've officially lived on my own and cooked for myself all summer too!

As badly as I've missed home all summer, I'm kind of sad to leave Ohio (I think this is mostly because the weather has been really gorgeous - perfect temperature, not humid - the last couple days). I think I've made it pretty clear how much I've learned in terms of being a researcher, but I think I've grown a lot as a person too. I'm not going to elaborate there, but I think I have a much better grasp on what I want to do in terms of graduation and going to school too.

Anyway, I'm going to wrap this up and finish packing and cleaning. I'm STOKED to get home and am really starting to get antsy to make moves on getting myself ready to leave. The final countdown!

For my last musical contribution, I have two songs. The first is awesome, possibly one of my favorite songs, and everyone seems to love it (including the people I introduced it to this summer): "Pick Up the Phone (Michael Van She remix)" by Dragonette (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXuPfDoH-SU). The second is called "Leaving on the Fifth" by Voxhaul Broadcast (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvHDeBps_Y) and while I'm not leaving on the fifth - it's the thirteenth - I figured it was a relatively appropriate title and a good song as well.

Looking forward to the future, see you all at AGU!

August 7th, 2011

Countdowns I've had going in my head:

1. Abstract due. 8/4/11

This past week was the week of the abstract deadline for AGU so Monday to Thursday was spent writing, thinking about what might be going on, sending a draft to Mike, waiting for comments and revisions (which included a variety of activities, the most work related being modifying my maps and making real cross sections with GMT's pscoupe command), editing my abstract when he sent it back, and doing all that over again until I finally submitted it around 12:30 on Thursday. And as it turns out, the best thing (but by no means the most interesting thing) I learned from my abstract was that after mapping out the over 600 events I looked at over the course of the summer, the locations matched up very well with the events as Antelope chose them, which means no more picking P and S arrivals - hooray!! Friday I met with Mike and have begun making a map of where my cross sections are so we can really see what features we're observing with the clusters we see in the cross sections and on the epicenter density map Mike made earlier in the week. The next week will probably be more of the same map modification as Antelope runs through more of the MARS data we have. MARS was operating for about 18 months and we run 2-3 months worth of data for Antelope to make picks on at a time, which usually takes around 18 or so hours.

2. Move out, lose air conditioning, move in to Stefany's. 8/5/11

This past week was also the week that mine (and Brady's) leases ended on our apartments, so we spent most of Friday morning cleaning up our respective places and moving out. Hopefully I got everything. We're now camped out in Stefany's apartment (thanks again, Stef, if you ever read this...), being extra clean, and watching dvds we rented from the library down the street/

3. ONE WEEK TIL I GET HOME. 8/6/11

A minor celebratory moment. I cannot wait to go home.

4. Make myself start running again (there is still no pool access). 8/7/11

Something I debated doing yesterday, but decided against it and went for a lazy Saturday instead. I went for literally a 20 minute run outside in the middle of the day today (a highly questionable life decision considering the humidity but I was getting antsy so I did it anyway - HUGE step for me, the aquatics girl). I've been doing a lot more running this summer (in the air conditioned apartment complex gym) and it's getting much less onerous (ie. I've made a crazy amount of progress in terms of distance and actually motivating myself to do it) but still, I've got a ways to go. Hopefully this week I can talk myself into continuing to wake up early and go running (hopefully for longer than 20 minutes) before work while it's still "cool" outside.

5. FLY HOME. 8/13/11

My number one, most important, favorite ever, time-cannot-move-fast-enough countdown. There are way too many things I'm looking forward to in getting home to even consider listing them here. But I'm stoked to see my family and my dog and my friends from high school. Also, I'm also dying for there to be no more humidity. Seriously, get me home.

I'm going to end my list of countdowns there, though there are still several things going on that list (going to Hawaii for a research trip with my department from school, my 21st birthday, seeing all of my friends from school...). Anyhow, with the busy work week ahead, and the fantastic things I have to look forward to at home, my song for the week (sent to me by my brother) is 'No Rest for the Weary' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIqMIrmpUjc) by Blue Scholars. I just have to keep at it and the countdowns will continue!

July 31st, 2011

As I mentioned before, this week was mostly dedicated to making more picks on events to try and get up to 600. I made it! Friday afternoon. However, after mapping them on my epicenters map and looking at the file that I'd created for GMT to use, I discovered that I'm only mapping 441 events. This is fine, I expected less than 600, but based on the record I've been keeping, I expected it to map 458 or 459 events. I'm 17 or 18 events off in my record and while I'm not worried about it, I would like to know why. Anyway, this coming week will be dedicated to looking at my maps and previous maps of tremor and major earthquakes and making comparisons so I can write my abstract (this is ACTUALLY my priority this week) before Thursday! (yikes...)

In other news, the university pool is now closed until August 15 (at which point I'll be home - hooray!!) which is a huge bummer. BUT I have located Oxford's public pool, so maybe I'll figure out a way to get myself over there in the evenings so I don't have to take up running every day. More importantly, my lease ends this week and I have to move out by Friday. This means a substantial amount of packing and shipping a couple boxes of apartment things home before I move out and into Stefany's (one of the grad students here and former IRIS intern) apartment for my final week. I hate packing and shipping so I'm really not all that excited about this but it does mean I'm closer to heading home so that helps things a little. Anyway, in order to actually get going on this I really need to do my laundry. Mostly because this is the last time I have easy access to a washer/dryer. I'm going do that now, but I'll leave you with my newfound California song: "California" by Radical Something (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53hindKbUyI). I'm chillin, keeping it going, but I'm really feeling ready to head home.

July 27th, 2011

So this is a mid-week post... not traditional, I guess, but I just had a major discovery in Antelope that I felt the need to share.  Mike is gone this week, so I've put map-making and abstract-writing on the back burner for the time being and am just focusing on getting close to 600 picks (the general number around which Mike suggested I aim for for my project). ANYWAY, instead of clicking on every single one of my arrivals to indicate that I want it to be used in calculating the hypocenter, I can just click on part of the dbloc2 screen where the picks are and drag the mouse across, down, whatever and as long as the P or S pick is inside the box I created, it will be turned to black and therefore counted when I tell Antelope to "Locate."  I can't believe it took me almost 8 weeks to figure that out. What a winner.

July 24th, 2011

The title for this week's post is symbolic of a lot of things this week. First off, it appears to have become our intern motto in the last week because everyone seems to be stressing about projects coming along more slowly than they thought or abstracts being due soon... I'm in the stressing group for similar reasons, but I'm trying not to worry. Everything will get done and I'll get there. Second, it's hot as hell out here. This weather is the worst. It's mid 90s every day with close to 80% humidity... so it feels like at least a suffocating 104 degrees every single day. It's horrible (west coast me PLEASE). I'm pretty sure I would have passed out or something else bad from water loss (because I sweat unreal amounts of water out of my body) if it weren't for the air conditioning in my apartment and Brady and Martin's beautiful cars which they drive to the freezing cold lab. And the pool. Just gotta keep swimming!

In terms of work this week, I've been moving along with the same things as before: making wave picks and modifying my maps. The most exciting things this weel were breaking 400 on events I looked at in Antelope and figuring out why my maps were mapping almost 100 events less than I had gone through.  I finally put my list of event IDs and whether they were good, bad, ok, or skipped into an excel document and figured out that in the 403 events I had looked at by the end of the day on Friday, I had either skipped or been forced to delete (due to their attachment to an event I had changed by making picks on) slightly over 100 events. Hence the mystery of mapping only 296 or so was solved! My next question is why it doesn't look like anywhere near 300 events on my map.... Maybe it's just me since I don't have much experience judging the number of points on a map, but Mike was mildly confused as well, so we've come to the conclusion (for now) that there is overlap of events that we just can't see that well. I've also made 8 longitudinal cross sections of the Jalisco block which I'll probably look at more critically this coming week. 

Outside of that, I've really been laying low. Like I said, the weather has been miserable so I've gone into what I'm going to call 'self preservation mode' (this is the Northern Californian in me...) and taken to staying indoors, drinking a lot of water, eating popsicles, and napping. Not too bad way to spend my evenings/this weekend but at the same time, really not exciting.

Anyway, I've listened to a lot of music this week. I finally downloaded the entire Miami Horror - love them - album 'Illumination' so I listened to that most of the week. I highly recommend it. There's also a great remix by Fred Falke of their song 'Make You Mine' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch9khBsN4Lg) that I listened to quite a lot.  The other song that made it into my walk-to-the-pool/general workout mix was Stuart Price's remix of Kylie Minogue's (yep, you read that right) 'Get Outta My Way' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTLLpIlj0Vw). Gotta enjoy that one, haha.

Stay cool!

July 18th, 2011

The delay in this week's post is dude solely to Brady's and my awesome visit to Memphis to Dylan and Ado (and a friend of mine from school, Joe)!!! We left early Saturday morning and drove the 8 hours down to that lovely corner of Tennessee and 'tore it up' with each other for the weekend! It was a fantastic trip - it was great to see Dylan and Ado and it was really nice to get out of Oxford for the weekend as well. As promised, LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" was our theme song for the weekend, but I'm glad to be back in Oxford and looking forward to getting back to work; this weekend was a great break.

But back to my work week - I finally started writing some GMT scripts to map the earthquake locations I've been using Antelope to find. I'm making maps to show the locations from a bird's eye view as well as figuring out how to make cross sections that show distribution by depth as well. 'Awk' is an awesome command and map making is more fun/more complicated than I thought. Other than that, I'm just continuing to make picks and find more hypocenters. That's about everything in a nutshell. I'm planning to try and make my maps a little cooler this week too.

Lastly, in terms of my musical entertainment, I went on a little bit of a cheesy euro-kick at the beginning of this week with Inna's "Deja Vu" featuring Bob Taylor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1U1qyLCWjU). But by Thursday I was back to more 'normal' for me with Madeon's awesome 39 song mashup called "Pop Culture" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA). Hope you all enjoy those and have a great week!

July 9th, 2011

This week was more of the same in terms of picking waves, but instead of taking time to make the most accurate pick possible for both P and S waves at each station Mike had me switch it up to make precise P picks but generalize the S picks more to speed up the time it takes for me to go through each event.  I was at event 70 on Wednesday and by Friday had gotten to 201! Also, I found out that instead of going through all 2000 events like I thought I would have to, Mike thinks only 500-600 will be a sufficient number of events for my project (an awesome discovery as well). Hopefully I can get through that this week so I can start mapping the locations!

On Thursday, we had our first IRIS webinar! It was about communicating research with non-scientific audiences - quite interesting and very informative. I wasn't very excited about the 'homework' we were assigned but I think it will be a really good thing for me to do and for me to practice.

Mike is also in charge of finding sites for the US Transportable Array when it comes to Ohio, so on Friday Martin, Brady and I got to accompany Mike and the two people from EarthScope who try and find sites all over the state around Oxford. I got a tiny bit of firsthand experience of what it's like to locate a good site for a seismometer and I learned that Miami U has 1000 acres of nature preserve areas that you can go running and walking in! I'll have to check that out at some point too.

In terms of fun, this was my first 4th of July not spent with my family and my cousins! So sad! But Brady and I drove to Indiana and got some fireworks to set off (always excellent - the warehouse we went to was ENORMOUS) and the two of us and Martin went and watched Oxford's fireworks show on the 3rd. It was a good show and the echo from the fireworks in the surrounding hills was awesome! Also the most patriotic show I'd ever been to... they played the national anthem before and what I'll call 'America-is-awesome' music throughout the whole thing (in case you were wondering, they definitely don't do that in Tahoe City, CA or Portland, Oregon where I've spent all previous 4ths).

Today we went to the National Museum of the United States Airforce which wase AWESOME. I LOVE airplanes and they had planes from the earliest days of aviation through each of the wars the US has participated in all the way up to much of today's aircraft including space travel and missles. SO COOL. I had a great time! And on the way back we discovered a treasure trove of outdoor activites (biking, boating, archery, paintball, swimming, hiking, mini golf kind of, etc) at a state park just a few miles north of Oxford. All in all, a very good day (:

Anyway, I'll leave you all with my song for the week: "From the Music" by the Potbelleez (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22AvQEZ7Eh8). It's upbeat and that's key in making arrival picks... and it keeps saying "never going to get too far away from the music" - probably true. I debated making LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ6zr6kCPj8) this week's selection, but since Brady and I played it all day when we were alone in the lab on Thursday and made it the theme song of our upcoming roadtrip to Memphis (to see Dylan and Ado!!!), I decided to give it an honorable mention this week. Maybe it'll turn up in a later post...

And on that note, I'm out for now.

Later!

July 1st, 2011

This week I got my very on data set from Jalisco! Mike ran it through Antelope initially, so now my job (as I'm sure I must have said before) is to go through and look at the events that Antelope chose and pick P and S waves so that a model can use my picks to estimate a hypocenter for the detected earthquake. This particular data set runs from January 23, 2006 to March 22, 2006 and while I've been working diligently I feel like I've barely made a dent in this data. There are a ton more stations and many more events than in the Oaxaca data that I practiced with for the few weeks before this. However, I'm getting better at recognizing when an event Antelope picked is deeper than I want (the model I'm using is for shallow quakes) or not really an event at all so I don't waste time picking wave arrivals for 30 stations or so only to find that the residuals are enormous or the location fluctuates hugely every time I run the model. Progress! But since I spend my days choosing waveforms, I've learned that the best way to get through this is to just try and pick to the beat. This isn't actually possible at all considering I have to look at the waves closely and switch from station to station, zooming in and out depending on the view I need to make a pick; you just can't time that to any kind of musical beat. BUT I just wait for the moment when I've made all my arrival picks for the event and I get to go back to the dbloc2 window (instead of dbpick where I locate and label wave arrivals) and click on each pick I made so it turns from gray to black meaning it will be taken into acount when I press the 'Locate' button to run the model. This I can do to the beat. My song for this week was "Château (Briefs Remix)" by Housse De Racket (sent to me by my friend Sam J.) - you can hear it here: http://www.514blog.com/2011/06/kitsune-presents-gildas-kitsune-club-night-mix/, it's number 12 on the playlist (pretty sick playlist overall too).

Locating earthquakes aside, this week has been pretty low key. Last night, Stephany (one of the grad students and former IRIS intern) had me, Brady, Martin and some other people over for some phenomenal homemade pico de gallo (I got to cut up the cilantro and the onions!), pizza, explosive fun playing a volcanic disaster card game, and apples to apples (always a quality choice). Good times! Other than that, I really can't believe I've been here for almost a month... aaand that's about it.

Happy 4th of July weekend!

June 29th, 2011

This week I continued to practice using Antelope using the Oaxaca database that Mike gave me last week. Antelope suggests P and S wave arrivals then allows me manually evaluate and modify the wave arrivals that the program chose. From this, the program then gives me residuals in order to assess the precision of the picks and calculates a latitude, longitude, and depth for the hypocenter of the earthquake.  I have been working through the entire month of July 2006 and finished it this Friday! As I've learned, techno remixes, dubstep, and rap are clutch in powering through. Anything with a good beat really. My song to share from this week's playlist (and from my friend Evan) is an energetic mashup of Avicii, New Boyz, and Lady Gaga, called "Dancing in the Backseat": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h9r0iaymPI. With the help of my 'motivational' music, I have gone through a lot of data and have become very comfortable with choosing arrivals and manipulating dbloc2 to get the best outcomes for earthquake location. I'm sure this will serve me well next week when I start working on the database Mike has made for me from Jalisco! 

Aside from work this week, Martin, Brady, and I discovered (while watching the USA vs Panama soccer game in the Gold Cup) each others' love and appreciation of Star Wars. So we decided we had to watch them all together (except not the most recent three, since we all agree that these movies, well, suck). We finished with Return of the Jedi on Friday night with a fantastic meal of pizza and cheesy bread with marinara sauce. Such quality evenings. 

Other than working, I've been attempting to fulfill my duties as a collegiate water polo player and have been really good about lifting and swimming this whole week. I even ran a few miles (breaking news since I haven't run at all in over a year). I also found the library on my trek to the pool one morning and Brady went and got a library card, which is great because now I know I can get one and maybe find some books to read (or do GRE practice from - I still haven't decided when to take the test...) instead of eating everything in my fridge and watching online episodes of The Big Bang Theory.

It looks like the weather here is finally getting slightly less rainy (not complaining because at least it's not so humid when it rains) which will be nice, if only because it'll be sunny enough for us to play some more sand volleyball. I need to practice! If the sun's out, maybe I'll switch it up and just hang out at the pool (for fun!!!) in the apartment complex. Who knows what this next week will bring!

June 17th, 2011

This whole week was spent learning and familiarizing myself with Antelope. The whole week. The first few days were still really slow, sometimes positively frustrating, and yesterday Martin, Brady and I all left work early to nap, get groceries, attempt to access the server and the data from my laptop in my apartment, and watch 'The Departed.' But today I had a major breakthrough. I went through a few my questions and talked about some of the supposed 'malfunctions' I was running into in the program with Mike. By the end we worked out some of the issues I'd been having with the program to a point where I spent the rest of the day actually finding the earthquakes in my sample data set and editing the program's arrival picks with no problems! Today was a good day (I can't say that phrase without Ice Cube's "Today Was a Good Day" popping into my head) and next week I get to start working with my real data from Jalisco!

I also went to my first scarecrow building on Tuesday. Stephany (one of Mike's grad students and a former IRIS intern) volunteers at a local garden and asked if I wanted to come along. I figured, why not? So I accompanied her and helped make the grandpa in a family of scarecrows. We couldn't decide on his name and the picture refused to upload but he has a sweet moustache and is approaching a certain level of obesity (bursting out of his overalls). Other than that, I've been enjoying the cooler weather this week (thank goodness) and chillin with Brady and Martin around the town and the apartment complex. We had an epic afternoon of 'beach' volleyball last Sunday (I was terrible, and chances are, there will be a repeat this weekend unless it's pouring rain which it's supposed to), and a very solid dinner of "mexican" food on Wednesday amongst our "whatever's-on-tv" movie watching that takes place most the evenings.

Well, I think that's all for now. I'm missing California as usual, but I'm enjoying work and my time here so far! And on that note I'm leaving you with one of my favorite (the boys didn't quite appreciate it as much as I do) music videos of all time that makes me happy without fail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyARHscb8mU. The song is great too, this particular remix is really good, and like I've tried to convey, the video is totally awesome (I want that man's dance moves, haha).

Cheers to a good weekend and a productive week!

June 13th, 2011

Martin (2010 intern) and I were driving home and upon discussing whether or not a long cobbled street was better or one giant hole in the road due to construction, I provide you with a portion of our conversation:

L: It's like those studies that talk about if it's better to induce a lot of smaller magnitude quakes or just have one really really big one

M: So the cobbles are the tremor, the construction is the megathrust quake."

It had to be done, we study earthquakes. Which would you choose?

Yours seismically,

Lizzie (and Martin, who was driving)

PS. In honor of that moment, I present you all with the equally nerdy but more educationally minded Bill Nye the Science Guy (anyone remember him?) "Earthquake Rumble": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe7mfz8dnjw

June 11th, 2011

Linux, SAC, and Antelope.

I spent my whole first week here in Ohio doing computer tutorials on how to use these three programs, not a bad start to the internship. I've never been much of a computer person, any of my friends can tell you, but they wouldn't even recognize me now with all the things I know how to do! (I'm only half-kidding because seriously, I've learned a ton). Even though things have gone relatively smoothly, Antelope has been giving me more trouble than the other two. I spent several hours yesterday trying to bring up one window in the program, finally figuring it out in a moment of personal glory, relief of frustration, and intense embarrassment when I realized all my problems had come from trying to run the command out of order in a sequence of steps. In my defense, I was using two tutorials and it can get very complicated and confusing when skipping back and forth between supposedly corresponding parts. Either way, Mike says most of my project is going to be done using Antelope so by the end of the summer I'm going to be a pro (heads up for you all, personal goal for me). 

In terms of general living, I succesfully managed to cook for myself without burning my apartment down (though I had a near miss with setting off the fire alarms), figured out how to work the AC (clutch discovery, and embarrassingly not one of my strong suits as my orientation roommate Caroline B would attest), and found the pool so I can finally go swimming again (feels SO GOOD). It's really beautiful here too, I love all the trees, but it's hot and humid and I have never been happier in my life for last night's torrential downpour of rain. It's so much cooler today that I have all my windows open; I really miss California.

Everyone in the lab has been amazing this week too. Mike is cool and we have a little IRIS family going over in his lab with me and Brady being the current generation, Martin (one of last year's interns), and Pat and Stephany (who went through the program a few years ago). Martin and Brady (who gets here for real tomorrow) actually live in the same apartment complex as me too which has been awesome in terms of just chillin and getting rides to work (thanks guys!). 

Anyway, since I seem to live my life to an internal soundtrack, I'll leave this week's post with a song that 1. managed to make its way into Orientation*, 2. is awesome and just gets better every time you hear it, and 3. is from the only place I like to call home: the California Bay Area. This week's song is 'Wolfpack Party' by the Pack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeVcIw5ImeU. If you go out and find the music video a few of my friends make a 3 second appearance around the 3:28 mark (if I recall correctly).

Cheers!

* Dwight and I teaching east coasters Caroline W (left) and Kimmy (right) what Wolfpack Party is all about at our final dinner (6/3/11).

(Photo credit to Kelsey)

June 3rd, 2011

So to start this off, this is not only my first blog post ever. Orientation has been a lot of firsts from coming to New Mexico to actually doing things in UNIX and MATLAB to meeting all the other interns and the staff members (who are totally awesome). Continuing in that theme, I guess the whole summer is going to be this way, full of new things, but I'm excited. I've never really done any research or really anything like this before so I'm stoked to learn and see how this goes. I'll be working at Miami of Ohio looking at a subduction zone in Mexico this summer and everything I hear about Oxford and the people in the lab has been awesome so far. And another intern (Brady) is going to be there with me! We're gonna kill it.

I'm going to sign out for now and say hopefully I'll get better at these as the summer goes.

Cheers Socorro!