I've been home from Alabama for a week now and I thought I'd reflect a bit on my internship experience. Overall, my internship was extremely valuable to me. I can barely believe how much I learned throughout my nine weeks at the University of Alabama! The most obvious area that I learned more about was in seismology itself. Before beginning the orientation and internship, I had no idea that seismic data processing even existed! Now I have experience working with a number of important seismic processing and interpretation tools! One of my goals for the internship was to become more comfortable with the programs Dr. Goodliffe said I would be using in the internship goals timeline I was given back in New Mexico. I really think I've surpassed this goal. Not only did I learn two-hundred percent more than I already knew about ProMAX, seisworks, and gmt, I also feel that I've grown so much more confident in using computers. I also can appreciate more the use of physics and math as tools in reaching scientific conclusions. For these reasons, I am so grateful to IRIS and to my advisor, Andy Goodliffe, for helping me become a more confident, well-rounded science student!

Another goal I had for the summer was to explore whether geophysics is the career field for me. In this area, I believe I've learned as much as I've learned about seismic data. I know that I was definitely pretty close minded as far as future careers were concerned at the start of the summer. This internship, however, has really opened my eyes to what I love and don't love about geophysics. The frequency that computers have to be used in geophysics has definitely been one of the aspects that I do not particularly love. Though what I really love about geophysics and geology is that it is, as one of the career panelists in New Mexico put it, a lifestyle. I loved hearing about my advisor's crazy adventures and all of the awesome things he's had the chance to see through his work. I still have some more thinking to do but I know that, whatever career path I choose, I want to have a similar lifestyle. I am so, so glad that I got the chance to check out geophysics this summer through IRIS! While this internship has shifted my career aspirations some, it has also better defined the type of work I will do someday. Uhh...whatever that may be! :) Thanks for everything!

~Kristen

For old times: Awesome "whoop it up in Socorro!" billboard.

The above image shows my interpretation of the line 20 faults. This line is very important to my project and is the central figure on my poster. I really think that the growth faulting on the southern end of the line (closest to the color grid) is pretty cool. The numbers along the top of the figure are shot numbers and the numbers along the side represent time in ms. This data was stacked, autocorrelated, deconvoluted, and migrated in Promax before it was put into Seisworks.

Below is a sliver of the bathymetry that this line runs over. On my poster and to interpret for my abstract, I put this bathymetry right under the seisworks output so that I could directly see what the seismic data looks like in reality.

Then using both of the figures above, I made an ArcGIS map of the faults especially from lines 10, 20, and 30.

Because I don't have it labeled yet: Line 20 is the red line on the right side, line 30 is the yellow line right next to line 20, and line 10 is blue and intersects diagonally into line 20. The metamorphic core complex (the Prevost Range) is the feature along the eastern coast of the island surrounded by all the seismic lines.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago I started using ArcScene to see my area a bit better:

This shows line 10 (green), line 20 (blue), and line 30 (yellow) hovering above the topography that they were shot over. I can't figure out how to label it here but the metamorphic core complex is located just to the west of line 10.

~Kristen

Since I last blogged a couple of weeks ago, I've been busy trying to finish up putting everything that I've learned so far into one project. It's been difficult for me to get the whole, big picture in my mind. Because of this, my advisor had to get me back on the right thinking track a lot but his many explanations helped so much! It's crazy that this is my last week here! This internship has gone by so fast! It's scary to think that school will start again in only a few weeks. This week my advisor is in Hawaii! He's working with some colleagues on studying the woodlark basin even more! However, I've been told to email him many times with new and exciting updates of my abstract. I just sent him my second draft, which I think will actually be a bit too long. Per Andy's request on my last blog, I will post the past two drafts I've written of my abstract. They may be a little shifty in content, etc. but let me know if anyone has any suggestions! This week, I will also be diligently working on my poster in illustrator. I have a few cool looking figures to post here but I'll just post them when the image thing is fixed. One is this fault map I've made in Arcmap. The other will show what I've been doing for the past couple of weeks. It's a seismic line from seisworks with a sliver of the bathymetry from a gmt relief map underneath. It was Dr. Goodliffe's idea for me to put the bathymetry under a seisworks line and seeing the two figures together have helped immensely! Alright, here are the abstracts:

Draft One (just the intro.):

This week I've really been focusing on interpreting the faults that exist within each line. A few weeks ago, I used the map I've inserted above to see which lines I would need to process in ProMAX in order to study the area around Normanby Island (I can't figure out how to label it but Normanby Island is the island that is boxed in by seismic survey lines). Once the lines were processed they were inserted into seisworks, where faults can be picked in relation to time (ms) and shot number (I think!) Picking these faults has been really good for me because I've always been a bit wary of interpretation. :)

 Another exciting thing that happened this week was that we got the chance to see some of the seismic equipment in action! It was actually pretty funny because we took a chirp out to one of the dormitory outdoor pools nearby. It was really, really hot out but we were lucky in that no one wanted to go swimming (although some people wanted to tan and for some reason picked a spot right next to where the chirp was. I guess they didn't mind the chirping). I thought the chirp looked like a little boat and sounded sort of like a sprinkler when it was collecting data. We pretty much had to take the base of the chirp apart to make sure all the connections were working so I got to have some experience with taking equipment apart and then putting it back together. Very fun! After the chirp had been in the chlorine, we had to wash it off somehow so two of Dr. Goodliffe's other students and I had to put it in the shower in one of the bathrooms. This was really, really funny and I wish I'd brought my camera!

In my remaining couple of weeks in the lab I'll be writing and rewriting my abstract for AGU and putting together all the pieces of my data. Most importantly, I'll be trying to figure out what everything means scientifically. Dr. Goodliffe told me that I have to have a first draft of my abstract by Tuesday so I've been reading through some papers that touch on similar topics. I'll also be reading a copy of this huge, 43-page proposal that Dr. Goodliffe and many other scientists are sending in to get funding to do more drilling. That way, I'll know more about the practical purposes for studying the Woodlark Basin. I'm excited to put everything together!

My work in the lab this week has been really diverse! On Friday, Dr. Goodliffe loaded arcGIS into the computers and gave me the task of trying to figure out how to display the shots for the lines I've been working on into arcmap. I spent most of the day trying to figure out how to do that and even though I couldn't figure it out, I ended up learning and reviewing a lot about arcGIS in the process! On Monday, we finally figured out how to input the shots from promax. This process was really interesting because it seemed to stretch across most of the programs I've worked with so far. The shots were located in a promax file, then we had to use Unix script to gain access to the file and get it into the correct format for inputing into arcGIS. Once all that was done, it was actually pretty easy to display the shots in arcmap. Also on Monday, I got to go to a Ph.D defense. I really enjoyed listening because the student presented on biogeochemistry in the Gulf of Mexico, which I knew nothing about!

Yesterday, we spent part of the day looking at some of the seismic equipment that the University has. I remembered what we'd learned about hydrophones during orientation and how there is oil inside the tubes. It was really cool to look at a hydrophone up close and I was suprised to see the consistency of the oil. When I asked Dr. Goodliffe about it he said that it is special streamer oil that makes the hydrophones and plastic tube surrounding them more susceptible to being affected by the sound energy they are supposed to be recording (or something like that!) I also got to see a boomer, chirp, geophones, and one of those stratavisor computers that we used during orientation.

On Thursday, we're going to spend most of the day getting more comfortable with interpreting and interpretational programs (seisworks). This will be nice because I feel like I have a lot to learn in that area!

Happy Fourth of July!

~Kristen

I'm here in the lab waiting for one of my lines to stack so I figured I would do some blogging. The line I've just started working on is pretty long (to me, anyways). It has over 9,000 CDPs! So far this week, I have been processing seismic lines around the area in the Woodlark Basin that I am working on. This area is surrounding Normanby Island, which is off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The lines that I am processing are from a cruise that was done around the basin in 1993. Eventually I hope to post a map of the area I'm working on....once I figure out how to do it, that is!

So this weekend I went to Dismals Canyon in northern Alabama with my mom and sister. Dismals canyon is the exciting home of dismalites: little glowing worms that are only found in New Zealand, China, and Alabama...(I thought this was pretty random but interesting...) It was pretty awesome and was actually not so hot. Then we went for a ride on the "Bama Belle," which is a tourist-y cruise-like ship that rides along the Black Warrior River (which is right across from where I live). It was cool... all the other passengers got really dressed up so it really felt like a fancy, southern experience. :)

Soon, we will be learning how to map out the faults and our lines in GIS. That will be awesome because it's hard to visualize where everything is when just looking at a seismic line. Well, my line has been stacked for 5 minutes already so I should probably go...it looks really interesting...lots of faults!

~Kristen

Sorry if this font is really small. I tried to make up for it with the bold green :)