eat the crust

Dog Days

bethbartel — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 04:11:11 +0000

The dog days of summer are here already, and it’s not even summer. Fires are burning a ways north of here near Fort Collins, but within view if you’re up high enough, and people living in the hills outside Boulder are nervous with this seemingly continuous wind, heat, and dryness. Every day, it is hot, dry, and windy. Sonora lay panting all evening, just on the carpet of our apartment. She is still panting now. It’s 9:43 p.m. Hot. June. Hot!

Eady Turns 1

bethbartel — Sun, 06 May 2012 18:08:45 +0000

The semester is essentially over, and I have moved my goal of finishing my master’s for May graduation to finishing my master’s for August. A bit of a bummer, but also a relief. I now get to focus (mostly) solely on my project, and it’s kind of delicious.

I also have time to do things like attend small friends’ birthday parties. Today, baby Eady turns 1 and helps Shaq celebrate receiving a PhD. Happy birthday, Eadie!

Coming up Tulips

bethbartel — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:02:17 +0000

Yep, our tulips have started to make their way back out from their winter underground. Another beautiful day in Boulder, and another five hours to spend underground in the photo lab! Kind of makes me feel like a tulip…

Small meeting, big thoughts

bethbartel — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 03:58:54 +0000

Every two years, UNAVCO hosts a workshop for the greater geodetic community. This consists of a three-day meeting filled with plenary sessions and breakout sessions, discussion over meals and drinks, meetings between international collaborators, and the next big thing. The UNAVCO workshop is where I first learned about slow earthquakes, more formally known as “episodic tremor and slip” (ETS), events originally thought to be electrical glitches in instruments but now recognized as sliding along subduction zone interfaces without an actual rupture. (For more, check out the Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array site at Central Washington University.) These ETS events may influence when large earthquakes are likely to occur at subduction zones like the one off the coast of Canada and the U.S.’s Pacific Northwest, and certainly tell us something about how stress is accommodated along these important plate boundaries. So, the UNAVCO workshop is a small meeting (there were 196 registrants last week), especially compared to behemouths like AGU, but it packs a punch.

This year, I was only able to attend scattered sessions, as I had ten hours of lab time scheduled on the three days of the meeting. Still, I made it to some interesting talks and discussions. The biggest thing I was exposed to this year: underwater geodesy. I had spoken several months ago with a friend of mine about using pressure sensors to measure vertical movement at an underwater volcano, but didn’t know the extent of underwater crustal motion measurements. The pressure sensors on the volcano work by measuring, indirectly, the change in the water column above the instruments: When the volcano’s surface moves up, it displaces the overlying water. Thus, the pressure measured at the sensor decreases. And vice versa. But pressure sensors can only measure vertical movements.

For horizontal measurements, underwater arrays with acoustic transmitters are deployed and measured periodically from a ship. With the right instrumentation and equations, scientists can determine the precise location of their ship, and then the location of the sensors relative to the ship. Make a round of measurements as a baseline and then remeasure, say, after the Tokohu earthquake, which is what Japan’s coast guard did. On land, scientists measured up to about 5 meters (16 feet) of displacement, or motion, as a result of the Tokohu event. Underwater, scientists measured up to about 25 meters (82 feet!) of displacement, more than four times the displacement measured on land.

Subduction zones, by nature, consist of land on one side and sea on the other. If we only measure on land, we’re only observing one side of the process. If we can measure on the watery side as well, we can learn much more about how subduction and, perhaps most importantly, subduction earthquakes, work. In some places in the world, such as Indonesia, islands on the seaward side allow land measurements on both plates. But in most places, we’re limited to seeing what happens on the overriding plate only. That is, unless we start making more measurements underwater.

Will seafloor geodesy be the next big thing? I think it will. I think the more we see the results of underwater networks, the more we’ll want to see. There is already a sparse network proposed for Cascadia, off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Where’s next?

Snow Again

bethbartel — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:29:53 +0000

Crazy Wind

bethbartel — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:03:44 +0000

Winds up to 93 mph in Boulder yesterday. Wildfires, power lines down, an overturned semi. And a lot of crazy hair.

Afternoon Trees

bethbartel — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 05:55:07 +0000

Seeing Shadows

bethbartel — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 23:31:20 +0000

It’s a good thing I have a cold.

Because I have a cold, I stuffed a napkin in my pocket in case my nose started running in the movie.

But then I went to the wrong movie. I intended to go to see “The Island President,” which I was supposed to write up for The Boulder Stand. It turns out, though, that we had the information wrong on The Boulder Stand’s site, and although I had the right day and the right time, I had the wrong venue, and didn’t realize I was not about to watch a movie about the Maldives’ plight as sea level rises until several minutes into the film. I thought it was a little strange that the movie started out saying it was covering the years from 1938 through 2010 and that it was motivated by Czech and Slovak involvement, but you never quite know with these things. Well, until you do.

I figured it out. I was watching a feature-length film called “Nicky’s Family” about children sent from Prague to the United Kingdom to escape the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, just before Wold War II broke out. Enter the napkin in my pocket. I highly recommend this movie unless you have no desire to help other people or to be moved to try. Holy cow. Nicholas Winton was 29, went to Prague instead of on a skiing holiday, and was responsible for moving over 700 children, before their families were taken away to concentration camps. And then, he didn’t talk about it. His wife didn’t know until she happened upon a scrapbook 50 years later. The children didn’t know, either. The story is told by one of them–a man who is now a journalist in Canada.

No more spoilers. Find the movie. See it. See if you walk out of there feeling like you want to be selfish. I dare you.

Trapped

bethbartel — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:52:12 +0000

Pretty in Pink

bethbartel — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:49:21 +0000

Growing up in the Seattle area, there are a few things I felt like I was missing. I based my view entirely on what I saw in the movies, on TV, and in the comics–these were obviously the people who represented America.

Things they had that I did not:

warm beaches
white Christmases
(I don’t think I realized that the places with warm beaches probably didn’t have white Christmases, and vice versa)
crunchy fall leaves

Every once in a while, we’d get a dry enough spell long enough to make a pile and do the quintessentially fall jump into it, but generally the pile was soggy and slug-infested.

In semi-arid Boulder, however, the leaves are crisp and crunchy and beautiful and abundant, and then it snows and they become snow-covered, and then the snow melts out and the leaves dry out and are crisp and crunchy again. What a marvel.