Professor Toke's Geoscience Blog

I sured up the international travel and field learning component of my sabbatical by booking my trip to the IAG conference in Christchurch New Zealand. I’ll fly from SLC to Auckland via LAX and was able to get the round trip fair for ~ 60,000 delta skymiles! I’ll spend 2.5 days in Auckland, 1 day in Wellington, participate in a 2 day pre meeting field trip studying active tectonics, stay 6 nights in Christchurch for the conference which will include a midweek field trip (I think I’ll either do a glacial or a rocky coastal field trip). After the conference, I’ll spend 3 days in Queenstown and get a glimpse of Fiordland and the Southern Alps. This will be a coming full circle trip for me as my first geology ‘research’ project was studying the topography of the southern alps in relationship to the various faults of the region under the supervision of Dr Keith Klepeis at UVM. I’ll see if I can dig up what I wrote about before the trip, not sure it will be possible. Probably will try to tak...

Honestly, I didn't do much work, though I did bring my computer on our quick trip to Vegas to show Debjani's family the area and celebrate our wedding anniversary.  I did get some much needed break from screen time and I didn't even look at one slot machine. Too much time driving though and an unwelcomed hiatus from the bike and running.  Since returning I got out for one gravel bike and one jog with the doggos. No major loss of fitness observed.  Today, I did a few emails and some literature exploration while responding to a former student about some questions they had about the impact of Lake Bonneville on the earthquake activity of the Wasatch fault. That of course is a great topic with a number of good papers that have explored it.  Otherwise, I have been contemplating what conferences to go to during the sabbatical and the pressing questions is what major conference (international). I need to decide right away about whether or not to attend the 2026 IAG conferen...

Today, was a being 'on' recovery day, after 3.5 days of meeting fun. I had a solid road ride, collecting a couple of PRs and top 10s. Overall fitness has taken a hit over the past two weeks, but it should be easily recovered.  Work wise, I spent 30 minutes contributing via a survey form to the Statewide California Earthquake Center's SWOT (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis. Having not attended the annual meeting in two years, it was a bit challenging, but certainly important given this time of rapidly draining support for federal science agencies including the USGS and the NSF which are the primary two support mechanisms for the SCEC center. There are private partners (e.g., PG and E, and cities, etc.), but certainly there is a major current orange threat sabotaging America's scientific and emergency response enterprise from within. All to make everyone more dependent on oligarchs. It's disgusting. I gave it my best response. The reality is t...

Another long (10 hour) day of excellent geologizing with some of the most well trained minds of Quaternary Geology in the region including Ben Laabs (Glacial and Quaternary geology/geomorphology), Jack Oviatt (Bonneville history), Paul Jewell (All Quaternary geology local to the region), and Genevieve Atwood (GSL shorelines). There were just three stops, but we spent all day talking Geomorphology. Fun times with everyone involved including Dr. Rachel Atkins (UVU) and Kristen Smith (BYU) and like minded geologists from Montana, Vermont, Idaho, California, New Mexico, and Beyond!  Learning and Pondering: I am slightly embarrassed to say that I either forgot or didn't previously know that the primary reason that Bonneville shorelines likely exceeded the height of previous pluvial lakes in the basin is because that sometime (after 30ka) during the lake cycle volcanics diverted the Bear River into the Bonneville basin increasing the drainage area (and discharge) significantly (more than...

Our session (T7 - Neogene Tectonic Geomorphology and Landscape Evolution) was packed at 8:30 am and we had a series of really interesting talks covering Tectonic/Landslide Hazards near Bozeman, Mega landslides across the Wasatch Fault block, Paleoseismology at multiple sites in the region. Then Parker and I presented our posters in the morning poster session. I had a great time eating lunch with much of the UVU Crew (Photo Below of the Whole Crew present on Day 2 - some missing from Day 1 :( ... ) Then a few more talks and more poster time and the meeting was over.  Two UVU Student Posters (Kaya and Haley/Dylan) won Student Poster Awards from the prior day's student poster competition, representing half of the poster awards out of a pool of about 30 total student posters.  And just like that the meeting was a wrap! A 12 hour and an 11 hour

As Technical Program Co-Chair with Dr. Matt Olson (UVU), we were required to help out with orienting session chairs about the equipment in the Utah Valley Convention Center at 7am each day of the meeting. Being 'on' at 7am is not usual for me, nor is getting up at 5:30am for my particular type of career, but it is what it is and at least I didn't have to drive in from Salt Lake City like Matt. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a micky mouse show going on with the UVCC staff. The workers were only sort of sure what was going on with their audio/video equipment and we ended up having to move talks onto the laptops in each room via borrowed thumb drives (from student volunteers). By the afternoon session the GSA staff had come up with a solution for the less than prepared Provo Convention Center Staff. Other than this headache for Morgan, Matt, and Me the day was full of interesting talks and wonderful posters. I also got to catch up a little bit at lunch with Dave Marchetti a...

Today was the Sunday before the Rocky Mountain GSA Meeting of Provo, 5 years in the making thanks to Covid-19 cancelling the 2020 meeting. I spent 3 hours at the Ice Breaker event at UVCC in Provo and I spent about 30 minutes reviewing Parker's draft of our Ksn-q in Utah Poster. He had an all nighter ahead of him thanks to all the good new science he focused on over the past week, rather than just getting the poster done. The Ice Breaker was great, Danny Horns (Meeting Chair) gave a really nice speech recognizing Tiffany, Courtney, Morgan and Rebecca with the GSA for their hard work really organizing the details of the meeting and keeping all of us on the Organizational Committee on track to host what turned out to be a wonderful event. The ice breaker had a 1 hour Volcano Comedy show by Ben Miller.  https://www.benmillercomedy.com/volcano   The comedy, by the former artist in resident at the Hawaii Volcano Observatory was excellent. The perfect mix of geocomedy, combined...

Today, I constructed three figures examining Ksn-q via channels and drainage basins across: all of Utah, Utah’s West Desert in Central/Northern Utah, and a figure focused on the Wasatch Fault Zone from North to South. (2.5 hours) I also spent time on a peer review (1.5 hours) and a few emails (0.5 hours). 

These five days were mostly vacation, picking up Debjani's Dad and Sister at SFO, staying near the Fisherman's Warf and doing some touristy things like walking the Golden Gate Bridge, riding the Ferris Wheel just after sunset, saying hello to the Sea Lions, eating a Sour Dough Soup Bowl, riding a water Ferry to Oakland and eating lunch at the Ferry Terminal Building. I also ran my first 10k distance in a while (possibly since 2024), it felt okay.  Work wise - I didn't do much. Answered a couple emails. and mentally prepared for the upcoming Rocky Mountain GSA Meeting. (3 hours)  Friday May 16th, I picked up my poster which was printed while I was away. Looked good, will post a presentation photo next week. I said hello to colleagues in the office that were working on Spring 2026 scheduling adjustments (sorry!). I also wrote two letters of recommendation and did a little work for the UVU General Education Committee. Then in the evening I met with Parker to help on the finish...

Not much to report on this weekend, just cleaning the house ahead of relatives visiting. Working on some academic service (peer-review for Seismica and a letter of rec for a recent UVU grad).  2 hours work.  Also did a nice hike with the doggos and Debjani near Grove Creek: 

Today, I topped off our Rocky Mountain GSA poster on the faulting within Utah Valley on the hanging wall side of the Provo segment of the Wasatch Fault by implementing edits from coauthor Kristen Smith and adding a small panel exploring scarp diffusion modeling helping to constrain the timing of the MRE at Kristen's Paleoseismic trench (4 hours work). One poster to go, thanks to Parker for taking the lead while we're busy welcoming Debjani's Dad and Sister to visit us this weekend.  I also road up South Fork/Provo Canyon (modest 3-6% grade climbing with some areas of 8-10%) with my new compact 46/36 crank and achieved personal bests on 8 min, 20 min, 30 min and 1 hour power outputs by being able to spin fast and not get fatigued: 

Got a little lazy with posting the the academic daily journal, but I did work (about 5 hours).  I also installed a 46/36 new Ultegra crank on my road bike to help me hold higher cadences on climbs (paired with an 11-40 XT cassette) for a sub 0.9 gear ratio. I suspect this is going to make me a better climber overall. Stay tuned for tomorrow's test on South Fork.  On Thursday May 8th, I finally got Parker four figures for him to choose from as he constructs our poster examining Ksn-q across Utah, prospecting lidar for active faults in Ranges with high Ksn values. One site of interest was along the Wasatch Monocline, where there are high Ksn-q values and a bedrock fault, but no mapped Q-fault. Looks like that bedrock fault jus to the west of the Monocline may have a Q-signal of uplift:  Here is another example of high Ksn-q in the Raft River Range where there is a cool low angle detachments fault that has brought up really old/hard rocks yielding high Ksn values, but no Q-f...

Today, I spent about three hours updating digital measures, reviewing my course SRIs and completing my annual self-evaluation in the morning. I also worked on a peer-review for an article submitted to the diamond open-access journal Seismica (1 hour) and I did some editing on my RMGSA poster figures (~1hour).  My student evaluations were positive and rewarding to read. The reviews from my advanced GIS course really have motivated me to begin working on that open-book that I promised to produce for that class over the sabbatical.  I always find the annual self-evaluation process to be both annoying (because of the repetitive nature of having to enter everything in digital measures, copying from CVs, abstracts, emails, and then write about it qualitatively in the form as well) and yet it is a wonderful way to appreciate all the hard work you did over the past year. This year was no different. 

The main accomplishment of the day was finishing a draft of one of my RM GSA posters that is collaborative with recently graduated UVU students (~6 hours of work today): 

Highlights of the Day: Lots of rain in Orem 2.5 mile jog with Tori and Badger Lunch with Weihong and Debjani  Made slip distribution diagrams across three newly mapped faults in Utah Valley GSA final meeting before Rocky Mountain meeting. Met with Parker about his poster. Reprocessed and shared KSN-q for Utah with 1e6 drainage area channels, shape file of hard and weak rocks. Difference raster between KSNq and reg KSN. Interesting discussion with Parker about channels north and south of Uintas Ridge line.  Worked  ~6 hours total 

Today, Sunday, I did a two hour morning work session and a three hour evening work session on one of my two upcoming RMGSA posters. The main accomplishments were: Map of the new faulting that I will be presenting, situated among other well mapped faults in the area.  Cross section to 12 km depth, depicting how the faults might interact at seismogenic depths.     Began working on slip distribution figures for the three faults. Here is vertical separation measurements along the Genola North Fault, Error bars are on the order of 10s of cm, not shown:  Main points: The hanging wall of the WFZ is strewn with other faults which extend independently to seismogenic depths and have recurrence of earthquakes 2-3 each since Lake Bonneville last filled this valley.  Posters are due to the printer by the end of the week!  I also put in a good effort on a Mountain Bike ride: 

Today was Saturday, so naturally much of the day was spent maintaining life (e.g., uncovering the evap cooler, food and pet food shopping, cleaning and organizing etc.). Debjani and I had a nice Bengali lunch with Debanjan and Erin and we all watched the 1973 movie 'Paper Moon'. What a hoot. Thanks to them for the nice afternoon! In the evening I made some significant progress with my Rocky Mountain GSA poster about the faults in central Utah Valley (3 hours worked). I cartooned out all the major diagrams for the poster and began filling in the actual poster with figures from Kristen Smith's 2022 GSA poster. So far the Paleoseismic trench panel is there, an overview location map has been added and the references and acknowledgements. The major figures to add will be: Big overview figure of my new fault mapping along with existing fault maps of the Genola North fault, Lincoln Point-Dry Hollow fault, the norther Nephi segment faults and the Utah Lake faults.  A figure showing...

The day after UVU's spring 2025 graduation was a productive one.  I created and sent Parker Farnworth a bunch of files to help construct our Rocky Mountain GSA poster on Examining Normalized Channel Steepness across the state of Utah and the Wasatch Fault Zone (~3 hours of work): Hydrography GIS feature classes customized and clipped to examine the Wasatch Front vs Back.  Ran a customized TAK/Topotoolbox Matlab script to calculated Ksn normalized for discharge (precipitation weighted flow accumulation) and sent the resulting features. I finalized all 2025 grades (two Introduction to Geology classes and Advanced GIS) and I sent all materials needed to faculty teaching my Fall 2025 courses. (~1 hour of work). I set up our home's sprinkler system and did a little yard work.  I did a nice ~ 30 mile road ride around Provo and Orem:  https://www.strava.com/activities/14357981817  achiving a PR on a segment that I was aiming for.  I started this blog!

  I am a professor of Earth Science at Utah Valley University (UVU) in Orem, Utah, USA. I am starting this blog for a couple of reasons. First, I want to do better at documenting personal progress in research and learning for the benefit of myself and those interested in the types of research that I am involved with including Paleoseismology, Tectonic Geomorphology/Earthquake Geology, Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analyses of Landscapes and Cities . Second, I have been awarded a sabbatical from teaching and service for the 2025-2026 Academic Year July 1st to June 30th, so I want to keep track of my own progress frequently, creating an academic journal that I can look back on and assess how well I lived up to my sabbatical goals. Third, making this public could also be informative for others wondering what someone might do during a sabbatical year. First, I'll capture my sabbatical proposal goals : Scholarship : I aim to write/complete manuscripts for three (possibly four) earthquak...