Goals

June 8th, 2010

After meeting with Dr. Schwartz yesterday, I have a much better perspective on my research goals for the summer. To begin, I am to to become familiar with the general concepts of slow slip and tremor and how they relate to my research area in Costa Rica. I have been given various papers to look over to do that and my talk with Dr. Schwartz helped clarify much of the theory involved. I am also to gain basic familiarity with the computing software that I will be using which includes: SAC, Matlab, and possibly Antelope. In addition to this, I must be able to visually identify tremor and differentiate it form seismic noise and regular earthquakes. I found out yesterday that for now my research will be focused on triggered tremor in Costa Rica. I will be cataloging the large earthquakes that have happened in the last few years and searching for the subsequent data recorded from the stations in Cost Rica. Once I have the data, I will examine it for tremor in order to determine if it was caused or influenced in someway by the large earthquakes.

During the second third of my internship I will continue to read papers and gain familiarity with the computing software. I will also start to discuss my work at the sismology group lunches. For the final third of the internship, I will hopefully have some tangible results work with. This will help me to prepare an outline that will serve as the foundation for a later abstract. I have also been told that there could be a chance for me to go to Costa Rica to service some of the instruments. That would be awesome (fingers crossed).

Until next time,

Zach