Well not much has been going on the past week or so. Dr. Hole went on vacation and I'm working on making some graphs from old data relating pick quality to the distance of the receiver to the shot. Since the open file report accompanying the archived 1979 USGS survey results had all the information I needed, I just retyped the shot data and receiver coordinates into Excel and made some bar graphs. The OFR assigned "weights" from 0 to 4 for each pick, with 0 having very little uncertainty and 4 as highly questionable.

Last Thursday & Friday, Dr. Hole took me along for some field work in south-central Virginia, where the largest uranium deposit in the United States is located. Soils formed from the weathering of the bedrock were uranium-rich due to past hydrothermal activity. When this was discovered, the landowners and some neighboring farmers formed a corporation to explore mining possibilities.

It looks like I may get some data to work with soon! Dr. Hole had me look up the 1979 USGS Imperial Valley survey data from the IRIS archives, and I filled out a request form yesterday. (Does anyone know how that works? Does IRIS mail the data on a cd or is there a link emailed out?)

I arrived in Blacksburg Tuesday night, by way of the San Jose, Washington Dulles, and Roanoke airports. A friendly stranger gave me a ride to Blacksburg when I missed the bus due to two flat tires delaying the plane to Roanoke, which I thought was very nice. It is so different here from the Bay Area, but it's been exciting to see farm animals, ten-minute thunderstorms in the middle of the day, and fireflies!