Austin's blog

It's been three weeks since I left Boulder and life back in Michigan is finally settling down.  Classes are going well and are fairly interesting (My Earthquake Seismology class uses the Stien and Wysession book we were givien!).  As for reflections...

My internship was considerably different than I was expecting, though certainly a great experience.  My project looked a lot shallower than most of the projects, which was really nice for me as an engineer as I don't particularly care about the Earth's structure several km down for engineering purposes.  My project was entirely active source, which was the main reason I wanted it.  I'm not particular to the deep stuff.  Near surface geophysics feels more like something I would use in the future either as a full time job or to compliment research.

The largely field-based aspect of my internship was a godsend.  I still spent a solid month processing, learning more about proper inversion techniques, processing again, learning what kind of information we could draw from the data, and then processing once again.  The poster-making process was a real kicker.  It's mostly done, just a couple more additions I need to remember.  That beast took me several weeks to really get how I wanted it and actually forced me to make some profiles I wasn't planning to make (I would like to thank my advisor Anne for the multitude of new ideas to add to my poster - it gave me a lot of rewarding work beyond what I was expecting to present).  About five days before giving my final presentation, I was positive I would have no idea what I was talking about.  I spent that last weekend making my final figures and that really gave me the confidence I needed to give my presentation without a hitch... in front of a bunch of soil scientists, geomorphologists, biologists, and geochemists.  This summer certainly was an experience both in the field/lab and beyond what I was paid for.

In the five minutes of free time I found today, I have decided to post my abstract.  I flew into Houghton just before midnight on Friday and started Orientation Team Leader training at noon on Saturday.  Days run long (usually 8AM-10PM in some capacity) and are tiring... but there's no doubt that it's very much worth it.

Anyway, I have to head off soon, so here's my abstract.  Hit me up with any feedback.  It'll be nice to have some people who aren't intimately familiar with the project to get a look at it and let me know what might be confusing or may be left out.

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Surface and Shear Wave Analysis of the Critical Zone in Betasso Catchment, Colorado

Austin Andrus, Kevin Befus, and Anne Sheehan

Today was an excellent last day of my internship. We went up into Green Lakes Valley (12,000ft) to do the final seismic surveys of the season. Beautiful weather, nice topography, and good company made it a decidedly great final day.

This past week seemed packed! I spent the entire weekend finishing up my data analysis and figures so I can have a good poster that will hopefully stand out of the 10,000 other posters at AGU in December. Abstract is on draft 4 or so, but I think it's pretty well set. Poster is done-ish (it'll need some touching up before I finally print it). I also have quite a few words for a potential paper I'll write on my project.

Tuesday was the Boulder Creek Critical Zone Observatory meeting at CU's Mountain Research Station where I gave a presentation on my research and results. Kevin gave a little active seismology and study area spiel for the audience, which was largely soil scientists, geomorphologists, and biologists, so they could understand the background a bit better, and then I took over, reducing my entire summer into about seven minutes. It went well and gosh, am I glad it's over.

I'd show you some results, but then what reason would you have to come see my poster in December? …...Fine, I'll show a little, but just a taste. My project essentially compared a few different techniques for finding S-wave velocity profiles to each other and to P-wave velocity profiles. We used both Vp and Vs to find out information about the quality of the subsurface materials as well as some water stuff (I'm being ambiguous on purpose).

But that's the near future, so here's the present and recent past...

Over the past couple days I've gotten a very good amount of work on my project done, especially considering that half of each day was spent talking with all the geomorphology professors about possible research opportunities with them in grad school should I come to CU. We finally found a good way to make decent S-velocity profiles in this Geometrics software. Most of the pieces of my figures are made, so I just need to stitch them together (this is a comparison piece afterall) and tell my story.