st louis, boulder, el paso, st louis: missouri, colorado, texas, missouri

August 5th I flew into boulder to give a presentation on the work that I had accumulated thus far.  It went well. My audience consisted of the staf who work at UNAVCO, the agency in charge of implementing Earthscopes PBO (Plate Boundary Observatory).  They're the IRIS of GPS.

Afterwards, i flew to el paso (hometown). I am not quite done with the paper im supposed to finish. Ive been here 2.5 weeks already, but all ive been able to finish is my abstract:

Shear Wave Splitting Analysis from Newly-Installed Seismic Stations in Antarctica

The tectonic fabric of the upper mantle is inferred using SKS and SKKS splitting analysis of data from 15 newly-installed broadband seismic stations in West and East Antarctica. Data collected between December 2007 and December 2008 from 5 stations from the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET experiment) and 10 stations from the Gamburtsev Antarctic Mountains Seismic Experiment (GAMSEIS experiment) are used to perform an SKS and SKKS anisotropy analysis of the regions. In West Antarctica, POLENET stations straddle the West Antarctic Rift System (WARS) while in East Antarctica GAMSEIS stations are centered on and around the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains (GSM). POLENET stations show splitting times ranging from .85s to 1.25s and fast axes in cursory agreement with the inferred direction of WARS extension.  For the larger focus of our study, GAMSEIS stations show wider range of delay times (.65s to 1.55s) and fast splitting directions that may indicate the existence of 2 distinct tectonic regimes.

Now that I am back in El Paso, Ive been keeping busy here at UTEP before I ship out to St Louis again. My advisor from St Louis (Doug Wiens) had known that I was going to be uncommitted during the fall semester, so he offerred me a position to return to St Louis for the semester.  I took it, and now we're just waiting for all the formalities to be completed. I should be back in St Louis the week after Labor Day weekend. 

Here in El Paso, Im keeping busy with some lingering work that never quite gets done. Mostly, myself, Aaron Velasco (advisor), and a post-doc named Hector Gonzalez have been working on modeling the stresses imposed by large amplitude surface waves on faults of given orientations. We're checking to see if the peak stresses in our models coincide with the observed onset of NVT. We've had some success, and are pursuing other avenues to make our results more results. 

 Well, I hope to get back to this blog soon with some more updates. Have a great day!