Welcome to Professor Toke's Geoscience 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) earthquake geology projects that I have completed with UVU students and colleague over the past decade. 

A) Earthquake geology and paleoseismology of the Genola North fault and other faults within Utah Valley. UVU alumni Kristen Smith (MS in progress @ BYU Geology) and David Johnson (MS in progress at ISU Geoscience) acquired an undergraduate grant which we used to dig a paleoseismic trench on the west side of West Mountain along the Genola North Fault. Kristen and David presented these results at GSA in Denver in 2022: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2022AM/webprogram/Paper378507.html I have been furthering this work with lidar fault scarp analyses along previously unmapped and mapped fault traces extending along both sides of the the West Mountain horst and will present this at the 2025 Rocky Mountain GSA meeting here in Provo: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2025RM/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/409902. The aim of this paper will be to document the connectivity of the various faults within Utah Valley including the Wasatch, Utah Lake faults, and the Genola North fault and provide information on their recurrence, Earthquake magnitudes, and their relative importance in accommodating strain. 

B) Paleoseismology of the Thousand Lake fault at the edge of the Colorado Plateau and Transition Zone into the Basin and Range. This will be a paper summarizing work done over numerous editions of my week of our geologic field camp studying the Thousand Lake fault. In 2017-2018 we dug a paleoseismic trench which demonstrates earthquake recurrence over the last 60 ka and careful lidar fault scarp analyses by David Johnson and myself prove that the fault's most recent event was post-LGM on the Thousand Lake Plateau and also allows us to estimate the event's magnitude. This project was featured as a part of the most recent regional FOP meeting and the writing and geochronology knowledge of the landforms involved in this study will be in collaboration with Dr. David Marchetti  and Dr. Tammy Rittenour. 

C) Paleoseismology of the Topliff Hills fault in Utah's west desert. This project got started during my last sabbatical and again involved a UVU field camp student group that presented at the last AGU meeting right before the Covid-19 pandemic and the writing and project is in close collaboration with UVU professor Dr. Michael Bunds and geochronology work by Dr. Tammy Rittenour. The interesting story about these paleoseismic results is that they extend back ~60,000 years and we see evidence for earthquake activity being modulated by the presence of Lake Bonneville. Also interesting, is that this fault is a part of Utah's second largest fault system: Toliff-Oquirrh-GSL. 

D) Documenting the Fault Exposures of the Dry Lake Valley Site along the Creeping Central San Andreas Fault. This project is years overdue, some work has been published, but I have been stalled finishing this paper which I started writing in 2017-2018. The value of this paper is that it documents what creeping fault behavior looks like in a trench, it documents the longevity of creep along the central SAF and provides additional data about the fault zone geology of this fault. 

Teaching Professional Development: 

I have been teaching Advanced GIS (GEOG 3650) at UVU for the past three years and five years overall. I plan to publish a free textbook (booklet) for this class with links to primary literature and youtube video tutorials which I have made for teaching this class. 

Travel: Mostly this sabbatical will be done from my home and work offices, but I do hope to attend an international conference and a couple of regional conferences, and take at least one field trip to a site of earthquake significance and I hope to get the time to visit friends and family on the east and west coasts of the US. I also plan to get as fit as possible on the bike and I might document some of these forays here as well. 

Okay, while this sabbatical technical starts in two months, I am going to document it starting May 2nd, 2025 and I'll write up a summary in July 2026. 

Gracias por su attencion!