Update Week 4

June 23rd, 2010

This week was fairly productive.

We received the shipment of 50 new boxes to move the old seismograms into. I will most likely take a day to just go over to the seismogram storage area and sort through and label all the old seismograms since many of them right now are mislabeled. 

I ran SeisDig on Matlab2007a on a PC and it worked really well. Now the problem is just getting Matlab2007a onto the Mac I'm using for research. I have the Matlab2010 version on the Mac now and it's been very difficult to get the 2007a version but hopefully that will be solved in the next few business days. But ultimately SeisDig looks like a promising program with which to digitize the seismograms.

I also picked out a bunch of seismograms from the 1938 box. The events that I chose are mostly teleseismic events because these show up as longer period waves on the seismic traces and should be fairly easy to digitize. I did choose out a few local events which show up as higher frequency and shorter period waves. These will most likely be more difficult to digitize but I will definitely try it out. Each event consists of about 6 long seismic trace papers. There are short period recordings and long period recordings for each of the E, N and Z components. 

I cleaned all the 1938 seismograms that I chose. The cleaning process is pretty straightforward and is a simple dry surface cleaning. 

After I cleaned all the seismograms I scanned them into the computer. As mentioned in my previous blog, we were having issues with the mylar sleeves enclosing the seismograms. This problem was solved by using a different type of mylar sleeve. So currently the 1938 seismograms are scanned into the computer and we're just waiting on getting Matlab2007a onto the Mac to get digitization started. 

On a different note, Harvard has weekly meetings for the seismology/geomechanics groups within the school. At these meetings grad students talk about important recently published papers or about their own research. At our last meeting my teacher asked me if I could do a presentation for one of these meetings about the L'Aquila earthquake in Italy and the prosecution case that is underway. She thinks it will be good presenting practice for me and I'm actually really excited about it! 

I think that's all for now. 

~Megan

* I want to post pictures of the old Harvard station seismograms but I can't figure out how to do it =(  When I use the "image" icon above and go to the "upload" tab and choose a picture it says something like the image URL is missing? Does anyone know what might be the problem?