Sarah's blog

As promised, it's high time I post a final reflection on my internship experience this summer. Where do I even begin. Following Michael's suggestions, I'll review the goals I set out at the beginning:

Part 1:Continue working to write up and edit the matlab code. Successfully deal with the glitches and whatever else comes up.

Yep, I feel fairly competent using matlab and can navigate sac and feel comfortable using unix machines. I'm amazed at how much computer knowledge I was able to gain over the summer. And from the sound of it, I'm ahead of the game for grad school as many students come in with little or no knowledge of this stuff.

Part2: Interpret the results. Are the correlated areas really tremor? Does the tremor found in Heather's method match up with Oliver's results?

Well, we didn't find tremor but the experience was definitely rewarding. And I feel like I've really contributed to scientific research, even if our results are so far inconclusive.  The codes I helped developed will be used to continue to search for tremor. I'm excited to see what comes out of all the research in the end.

Part3: Successfully contribute to a field experiment which has yet to be determined. If we get funding soon enough, we might be able to deploy an array of instruments somewhere along the NMSZ, if not, it will be something a bit different.

While small, this field experience was an excellent chance to explore a new area of geophysics, magnetics! It was great to be able to follow this from beginning to end, to work with Chuck and a couple of grad students, and to learn about magnetic surveys.

Here's my abstract, already submitted. I promise I'll do a final post as Michael requested once I get a bit more settled. Yes, I've finished my internship 3 weeks ago but I just got back from a roadtrip through Canada and Alaska with my dad last night and have been away from all forms of communication for awhile.

Yesterday four of us went up to Missouri to do a small magnetic survey over an area that looked like it might be of interest. A previous aerial survey of the area found a small (several km) anomaly and one of the faculty here was interested in the idea that there could possibly be some intrusions in the sediments (which go down to about 500m in the area). So, I spent the first part of this week getting familiar with magnetics and figuring out how to get the magnetometer working and playing nicely with the GPS. We had originally planned on doing a larger survey of a pluton in the area (the Malden Pluton) but due to time constraints decided to investigate a smaller, unnamed anomaly. It's probably a good thing we did too as the farm roads we were thinking of driving down were pretty soft still from all the recent rain and our brief attempt at driving down them ended about 50m in when we realized we would definitely get stuck if we didn't back out fast! So we ended up starting in the middle and walking out and back to the car. The data didn't look like much out in the field, all we saw were single point spikes really, likely due to buried objects such as pipes, barrels, metal coffins, etc...But today when I started looking at the data there's a definite sinusoidal anomaly. It has a very long wavelength (rough guess: about 8km) which means that it's quite a bit deeper than we were hoping (likely ~4km which is where the bedrock is). Still, we've confirmed that there is an anomaly present in the area, which is neat. I took some pics of the survey and the wacky looking contraption we carried around with us. They're still just on my camera but I'll post them sometime this weekend when I transfer them over. It was fun to try something new, and has been fascinating to see the whole process evolve, from planning, to execution, and now to interpretation. And I'm delighted that we were able to find some interesting data as well!

Things are going pretty well here. I can't believe I've only got a little over two weeks left before it's time to pack up and head home! I've learned so much, had some amazing experiences and met some pretty neat people. All in all, I'd say it's been a success so far. I'm not sure I can say I really like Memphis (at least not during the summer), but CERI is definitely a great place. We've been having a pretty intense thunderstorm since sometime last night, I woke up early in the morning because my bed was shaking and the room was filled with flashing lights. I bummed a ride from one of the grad students to avoid the rain, but of course the minute I stepped into her car the rain let up, figures.

Anyways, my search for tremor is winding down and while we haven't found tremor yet, I have learned so much about the whole research experience. Really, we've been looking at 6 comparatively broadly spaced stations for a small four month time window and hoping to find something that, if it does occur here, will likely only happen every 12-16+ months. Really, this summer has been an effort to get things running so that once Heather has access to the entire network some of the kinks will be worked out. It would be nice to find tremor, but it's also fascinating to me that we can see trains and wind in the data.