chelsea's blog

Alright, I have been doing WAY too much reading today. I needed a break! So I browsed through a few of the newer blogs and such. Looks like everyone has had productive summers!!

So let's face it. I miss Hawaii. A whole lot. So I also checked back so I could reminisce. I know, you all feel so bad for me! But since I started watching Lost, now whenever I watch an episode I get all sad because I recognize all the places...ugh.

Also, I wanted to throw out that I may be doing some interesting research out here in the spring! My advisor (and about 10 other professors) here at Cornell do work in the Andes. When I talked to her the other day we discussed potentially doing a project this spring! I would head down to Argentina (or maybe Bolivia) in January, collect some samples/data, and analyze in the spring! One of her other advisees also wants to do a project, so he and I could go together and help each other get all the proper data. I'm really excited about this, so I hope it works out! My college within Cornell provides some funding for undergraduate research, so things are looking good!

I feel like this internship helped me get focused in terms of my academic future. I feel way more comfortable talking with my professors about pretty much everything now. When I got back, I checked in with all of the ones who I have felt particularly close to, and it's really cool that they are all very willing to help me with grad school and other advice. I didn't even have to ask, I just stopped in to say hi and they brought it up! I mean maybe this just comes with being a senior, but I feel more confident about what I'm doing with my life! So that is great news!

I'm finding in my classes (yes, we have class already) that I'm talking about many things relevant to my summer project! My advanced petrology course should hopefully be enlightening, and perhaps it will make certain aspects of my research clearer to me.

Alright, first I will post my incredibly rough draft of my abstract. I suspect this will change quite a bit once I get Rob's comments on it. But here you go! This is what I've been up to all summer!

The L-SCAN Experiment: Mapping the Axial Magma Chamber Beneath the Southern Portion of the Eastern Lau Spreading Center

Alright. It's game time. I've got 2 weeks to write my abstract and make my poster. Here's what I did today!:

This is a map of where I think the magma chamber is at this point. It's a pretty rough sketch, I gotta talk to Rob about how I can make it any nicer. We'll see. This little cartoon comes from a whole bunch of data that looks like this:

Maybe now this will help you guys understand what I'm doing. So this map shows where these two stations sit (25 and 26). 25 is sitting pretty much right on the ridge axis. These are the record sections for those two stations for the shot line also shown in red on the map. I use a shot line directly in the middle of these stations to minimize error from differences in path geometry. So I measured the time delay straight off these record sections, and then did some real simple math to find out that station 25's first p-wave arrival comes in on average, 170 ms after station 26's. That's a pretty decent delay, meaning that there is some kind of low velocity zone intersecting the path between those shots and station 25, and not one for station 26. Okay, you can't just automatically assume that there is no LVZ for the path from the shots to station 26, but I am simplifying this because I've done this for legitimately a zillion different stations and shot lines, and I have yet to find any evidence for station 26 having any delays. 

I thought I'd say a little bit about this field course since we finished a bit early today. It has been pretty non-stop since I got here on the 19th. We are staying at a little hostel in Volcano on the big island, and there are 17 students enrolled. I would definitely recommend this program for anyone interested in volcanology!! We have different instructors for each portion of the course (seismology, physical volcanology, gas geochemistry, deformation), and do a lot of interesting stuff! Two of the instructors were PhD students from Manoa so I could chat with them about life out in Honolulu, which was really cool. One is finishing up and one had already defended. My instructor for the end of this week is a professor at Manoa currently, and his office is just down the hall from Rob's. Actually, one of my close friends from Cornell applied to do a Master's with him next year, but ended up in a PhD program elsewhere. All these crazy connections! Anyway, we are learning a lot about the history of the islands as well as field methods and applying them out here on Kilauea. We got to see (and play with!!!!!) an active lava flow coming from Pu'uo'o (a parasitic shield), which is along the eastern rift zone of Kilauea. There are 2 parts of the volcano that are active: the Halemaumau crater within the caldera, and then along the rift zone at Pu'uo'o. Halemaumau is really just steaming at the moment, but there are larger eruptions occurring sporadically. My knee hasn't been TOO horrible with all the hiking. I'm learning to walk without bending it much at all, which really helps. It's hard switching between different types of surfaces though. Like I'll get used to walking on lava (generally just Pahoehoe), then all of a sudden we'll be on a nicer trail and I have to change my strategy. But it's alright, I get a little slack being a cripple and all!