Week 2 (Sorry its a bit late)

June 28th, 2011

Last week was a lot of fun. I meet all the other COAS REUers last week and I am having a great time getting to know them all! On wednesday we went to Newport to visit the Hatfield Marine Science center. It was so much fun! We got to go on a tour of the facilities and see all the research that is going on there. They had a cool aquarium with local fish and sea life there too. The best part was the Pacific Octopus. It was soooo beautiful… (but octopus are my favorite animal so I have a biased opinion). After that we went on a little hike on the coast. There were all these beautiful jointed basalt flows on the sandy beach. We climbed up to the top of them and it was a magnificent view! I am so in love with the rocky beaches of the west coast.

Right now I am looking at the T-waves and finding the peak to peak amplitudes compared to the magnitudes of each of the earthquakes that was recorded by the ocean bottom seismometers and hydrophones. It is a bit tedious but so rewarding once I can plot them all up and see that it working. At some point I will be able to find the b value of the 3 day earthquake swarm and that will hopefully give me more evidence that this swarm was due to magmatic activity in the crust. We are trying to figure out if we can assign a magnitude to the smaller events. Even if we cannot acheive this, it will tell us more about the characterization of T-phases. I also started working on a program that cross correlates the T-waves so that I can eventually locate each of the earthquakes. I spent all day on Monday working on the program and I finally got it to work! The only problem is that it is giving me some “out there” answers. I am going to have to go back and work on it some more and fiddle with the filtering and the time window to see if I can get some better lag time and correlation values

I am also working on a Proposal for my research. It is mostly just for my own benefit so that I can get all my thoughts and methods out on paper. It also forces me to write more about the background of what i am studying. It will come in handy when I send my abstract to AGU in just a little over a month or so. I am really enjoying reading about mid ocean ridge geology and seismology… I am learning so much about a subject I really did not know much about.

Here is a really cool website that kinda gives the reader a clue of what I am working on… It is what the hydrophones (pretty much microphone that are underwater) are “hearing” in the oceans… There are signals from whales, earthquakes, volcanoes, ships, and mystery sounds. T-waves (what I am using to study the earthquake swarm) are used for so many applications including: submarines, ships, whales, volcanoes, and earthquakes.