kfoste's blog

That's the title of my abstract. I wrote it this morning, and tomorrow is my last day here before I head home, yet my work is incomplete. I've been working with two professors here, Ken Creager and John Vidale, and there is still a lot of back-and-forth discussion about what to interpret my my figures, and many many rounds of revision of my code for my figures and creation of new figures to look at something slightly different. There's also a lot of time spent staring at the maps I've created in attempt to interpret them and decide where to go next.

I have many figures to work with, but none of them are completely satisfactory yet, certainly not ready for a poster. This example of one of my figures shows a map of the Puget Sound portion of the Cascadia Subduction Zone overlaid with dots for each tremor event/location during the May 2008 ETS episode, and the color of the dots correspond to the height of the tide during that tremor minus the average height of the tide for the time period. Therefore, the red regions are places where tremor was occuring at above-average tide while the blue dots indicate tremor during low tide. 

Let me begin this overdue blog by stating that this summer has already exceeded all expectations and seems to be getting better by the week. In fact, it is probably because everything has been going so well that I haven't been writing up about it. In any event, I have spent the last several weeks going in and out of the field for a few days here and there (on the Olympic Peninsula, where my summer began with the Array of Arrays experiment), and when in the office I have been producing various figures and forms of data for correlating ocean tides with "episodic tremor and slip" in the Puget Sound. I have tremor data from Jan 2007 through Jun 2009 that I have been playing around with vai matlab to create various plots, most of which are suggested by John Vidale, a professor I'm working with at UW. Each time I create something and pay John a visit to discuss the results, however, he comes up with an alternative idea of what he wants next, so the project is not very well wrapped-up at this point. I have quite a few figures but no abstract as of yet or even discussion of it, and nothing in ways of a poster, but this doesn't worry me yet. 

I am currently in Lake City, Colorado, doing two weeks of field work on the Slumgullion landslide with Joan Gomberg and a small handful of others. Tomorrow we are deploying 100 texans in a grid on the slide to observe the tremor-like signal that is generated during the relatively rapid slip of the landslide.

To get back to where I began with this blog, I am thoroughly enjoying my summer due to a perfect mix of great new friends, interesting science, field work, fun weekends in the best city I've experienced, fun weekends in the mountains, beer, and freedom. 

While most of the interns seem to be winding down on their summer projects, I am finally begining the project I've chosen for myself. I am looking over tremor data from Jan 2007 through Jun 2009 from the Olympic Peninsula and correlating it with the ocean tides. This morning I struggled with matlab error codes for hours, when suddenly everything worked and there appeared my figures of month-by-month plots with tremor and tide on top of one another. First, I felt relief that I had produced something. Then, I scroll through and lo and behold- there's some juicy science going on! For the most part, there is beautiful correlation between high tide and tremor episodes, and my next step is examining more closesly the few inter-ets events that seem to anti-corellate. 

The magenta is a histogram of tremor events over time, while the blue is the tidal record. You can clearly see that high tide seems to induce tremor! Next step- publish a paper.