Michelle's blog

I got back from the field a couple days ago from my second trip to British Columbia. For the couple of weeks in between my first trip and my lsecond trip, I spent my time consolidating and post-processing our surveyed data from my first trip. That pretty much involved staring at numbers day in and day out, which can make you want to pull your hair out sometimes. When I was done with that, Kate Miller (my host) let me play around with some one dimensional velocity modeling for a day. It was nice to finally get some hands on experience with any type of analysis.

So, for my second trip to B.C. we deployed approximately 2400 Texans and had about 70 people helping with that. We placed a Texan (single component) every 200m on land and 400m in the fjords. Every kilometer we would place a 3-component Texan. We took two days to deploy the instruments and two days to pick back up with two nights in between to set off our shots. We were still able to explode the shot point that the Ingmar guy tried to destroy. As far as I know we want to press charges, but we are still unsure if that will happen. After all the hassle in the beginning, the experiment was successful.

This is just going to be a quick one. I am in B.C. now deploying our instruments and it came to our attention the other day that one of our drill holes were destroyed by a local in B.C. It's crazy what some people will do and make it public! Here is the link: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/activist+destroys+seismic+drill+hole/1790149/story.html

You can also find the article in the Vancouver Sun if the link doesn't work. Enjoy!

I am back in El Paso from my first two weeks in British Columbia (what a gorgoeus place!). My trip started with my flight being delayed an entire day. Which may have not sucked as much if I wasn't the one with the GPS systems we were going to be using. So that put us back a day. The main purpose of these last two weeks were to survey and stake the line for instrumentation. The surveying group consisted of six students split up into groups of two. The people that I worked with were great and from all over. Kai and David are from Virgina Tech, Andy is from University of Victoria. Audrey is from Quebec and Erin is from Texas.   The line that we surveyed (400km east-west line) started in the Williams Lake area and extended west to Bella Coola. Surveying was okay except the GPS units we were using are incredibly sensitive and do not like to work if you stand too close to trees or hold them too close to your body (there are quite a bit of trees in B.C.). Staking also had some of its own problems. The ground was very rocky. I'm sure it will be much easier to dig a hole for the Texan instruments we will be using. It turns out that several of our stakes were taken out by widening of a logging road and others were mowed because the town forgot to tell the workers not to mow them. Overall, the surveying and staking went well and we got the job done. I got to see a lot of the back country and do some 4X4 driving...lots of fun. Out of the group, we had one flat tire, one slow leak (easy fix), and only one car got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled out by a local.

I leave again for B.C. on July 9th to finish up the field work portion of the project. Until then, I will be post processing our survey data and putting together packets for the individual teams that will be placing the instruments. I am very excited to go back up there and see what is in store for me this time.