Getting to know my wiggles

June 13th, 2011

So far I am loving Oregon! It is so beautiful here! I love the cool weather, the rain, all the shades of green, and the bright, vibrant flowers, and that the ocean is only an hour or so away! It is so different from New Mexico, it is a great contrast! Corvallis is a really fun little town as well! I am excited to go exploring around the town and go hiking on local trails.

My first day of my internship (last Wednesday) my adviser and I drove to a beach town called Newport to visit the NOAA's Hatfield Marine Science Center. We went to go speak with a few other seismologists to talk about my research this summer and about what information we hope to gather at the end! I am going to be studying an earthquake swarm that occurred on the northern Juan de Fuca ridge (off the coast of Washington and Vancouver Island) back in August 2008. After talking to the other seismologists it made me very excited to start looking at the data! I also got to see the ship I will be on later this summer parked at the dock. Newport was really nice and had a beautiful beach! I plan on going back there a lot this summer.

Since Thursday, I am going through each earthquake and taking down information about its amplitude, duration, shape, and anything else peculiar I see. For now I am just looking at the largest earthquakes... there were a lot of earthquake in those two days of the swarm! There was at least 80 with the largest magnitude of 5.9... but there are so many more that I can see hiding in the data! I am having fun just scanning through them all and looking for interesting things. I love the idea that a so much information can be contained in a little wiggle... that is such an amazing thought for me! One thing that I have to worry about (since all the data was collected by ocean bottom seismometers and hydrophones) is whale calles and fish bumping into the instruments! I never thought I would have to worry about something like that affecting my data! I think it is cool though since I love ocean creatures, especially whales! 

This weekend I went to Portland to visit some old friends. I LOVE Portland! I hope I can go live there for a while someday. We went to the top of Mount Tabor (the only major US city with a volcano within its city limits) and climbed up to the top. From the top I could see Mt St Helens!! It was my very first glimpse at it. I am so excited to go visit and climb the volcano I have heard so much about. It was too cloudy to see Mt Hood though, oh well, next time!

Tonight I will be meeting a bunch of other students that will be doing an internship at OSU for the National Science Foundations Undergraduate Research Experience. It will be nice to meet some other students that will be here for the summer! They are from all different science fields so it will be very interesting to see what they will be researching. I will be tagging along with them to go on some weekend trips and going to lectures.

Well I guess that is it for now. I am really happy I got this internship!