Professor Toke's Geoscience Blog

Week 6 of the fall semester is half over and it feels like the moment to write this week's post: This week's GE committee meeting (Wednesday afternoon) covered editing a substitution request form, addressing an individual case and working through committee bylaws as well.  Last weekend I finished a full draft of Chapter 2 of the Advanced GIS Book, 4 more chapters to write. I need to figure out how to get some peer-review on this book and how to post it once it's complete.  This week, I started digging into my Dry Lake Valley Paleoseismic Site paper that I began writing about 9 years ago. I've already got a great abstract, introduction, methods, three tables, six of the eleven figures done. The big hurdle is going to be making all the trench figures and slogging through writing about those results, a lot of the stratigraphy/photos/logging observations are boring/less than satisfactory but it also needs to be published, showing all that null data (no earthquakes, lots of ...

Just bullet points: Finished a full draft of the second chapter (DEM derived products and Topographic differencing) for my advanced GIS textbook. Still need to do edits and tidy up some references. Will complete that this week.  Next week will check in with Thousand Lake coauthors and try to finish a long overdue draft of the Dry Lake Valley Trench study along the San Andreas Fault. Goal will be end of September for that. Will feel good if I can get two manuscripts in review before December and a full draft of the GIS textbook by Christmas. January will be preparations for the IAG conference and Spring will be Topliff Hills and Genola North Fault studies. Would feel really great to have all those done before June 2026.  Tori’s lymph nodes biopsy was negative (no sign of cancer spread)! Still watching her surgery site with fingers crossed. I do feel some weird nodules, quite pointy, small, and several of them, very unlike the original tumor. I really wish that they are just sca...

This week I drafted most of the text of chapter 2 of the advanced GIS book that I am writing (10 pages of writing so far). I also created 3 figures, but I still need to create 5 more figures and I need to create two separated practical application sections of the chapter along with accompanying video examples. This will likely the be next week's work. It would be great to be able to finish the chapter in just two weeks!  Tori's results from her radiography and ultra sound came back as positive news with no sign of spread to the lungs or other vital organs. The results from the lymph node biopsies on her leg have not yet come back and we are also waiting on some other blood work. While she is really quite happy and playful with the cooler weather that has arrived, I am worried that I can feel some small bumps on her leg near the surgery scar. I really hope these are not already re-growth of the tumor, but that is possible given it's aggressive nature. If true then additional...

I finished a ~9000 word manuscript (plus 8 figures) about the earthquake geology of the Thousand Lake fault this week/end and emailed it off to David Johnson (2nd coauthor) for initial editing before sending it to the whole coauthor group.  Need to decide what’s next on the agenda and whether to accept a manuscript review for GSA Bulletin tomorrow. I think I’ll try to finish a long overdue San Andres Fault MS or I’ll begin working on the second chapter of the GIS course textbook.  Had a pretty poor showing on the bike this AM. I think it was due to two pretty emotionally heavy days after Tori’s visit to the oncologist on Friday. The gist is that her cancer is a type that probably had some roots embedded in otherwise healthy tissue and thus it will likely come back. Because the cancer cells were grade III, it could have spread too and if it does come back it will likely spread. So we had them do X-rays, sonogram, blood work, and lymph node biopsy on Friday. The point was to che...