The following is almost strictly geology related. If you are reading this blog and not interested in the geology pictures, I suggest skipping to the last picture for a good laugh.
I have started working with a professor that focuses on geophysics, and that includes seismic work. I have been going out into the field with him to gather data, and it has been cool. The next 5 pictures are from a trip to an old and massive landslide a couple hours south of Provo. One of the sweet things about this setup is that I get paid to be taught. Love it. This day I was clocked in for 14 hours.
This (above) is looking down on the landslide where we gathered data. If I remember the picture correctly, almost everything you see is landslide material.
This is our project site. It is a little bog that sits on the landslide. The idea is that we can shoot seismic and find where the contact point is between bog material and slide material. Then carbon dating of the bog material closest to the contact will give us a rough estimate on when the slide occurred.
Here we are laying the geophones and line to record the data. The phones are every two feet.
The way we get the data is by pounding on a steel plate. That generates a wave of motion that is detected by the phones. We hit the plate at every phone, somewhere around fifty times. That is why the professors bring students along. This guy hammering is a grad student in the class that my mentoring professor teaches. We were the only two students.
This is a picture of how the seismic data shows up on the computer. Not much can be said about this. More correlating data is necessary.
The above is a sweet shot looking towards Provo from Provo Canyon. Specifically from the Bridal Veil Falls fold in Provo Canyon.
The next four pictures are from a structural geology field trip. If you would like to know more, I can send you the write-up I had to do. I tried to put a link to it, but was unsuccessful. The pictures are kind of in reverse order too.
This is what we climbed up to see, the very middle of the hinge of the fold.
I hoped this picture would give some idea of how high we were. You can see the road in the bottom corner.
This is trying to climb a face up to the hinge zone. Only one professor in the department would even try something like this with 20 students.
This is where we climbed to, zoomed in from the road. End of field trip.
This sign says it all. This is Death Valley, a field trip from mid October. The next several pictures are all there.
This is a salt flat we were looking at.
This sign says Sea Level on it. I haven't zoomed in yet.
Sea Level zoomed in.
Devil's Golf Course, which is a badly deformed salt flat, more or less. It looks like it has been plowed. It hasn't.
This picture is to show the vastness of the playa lake we were on. A playa lake is a dried up lake that occassionally fills slightly.
These are magic rocks. If you look closely you can see a trail behind the rocks. Nobody knows how they move, although there are theories. Some of the rocks are fifty pounds or more. The trail indicates they move when the lake bed is wet, but there are no other marks (like foot prints) that could say how it is done. It has to be wind, although the conditions to move fifty pound rocks are hard to imagine. Another theory is aliens. You could google this.
Sand dunes in the valley.
Death Valley, from the top. I still don't know how to orient pictures. Obviously. Death Valley has the greates topographi relief of any location in the country. Meaning that the vertical difference over the horizontal difference is huge. The mountains on the other side of the valley top out at 13000 feet, and drop almost straight down, as it were. End of geology pictures.
This is on my birthday. Elin made a delicious strawberry-rhubarb pie. Really, really delicious.
Logan came home looking like this once during high school. More or less. Turns out I have very narrow shoulders. I'll say it is the angle.
