California, baby, I’m coming home

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!