Professor Toke's Geoscience Blog

I turned 45 on October 21st and we celebrated with a nice dinner out in SLC and then had a few friends over at the end of the week too. Time is flying by in the semester 2/3 of semester means 1/3 of the sabbatical. I still am about 1/3 done with the work I proposed for the sabbatical, so that is good, but I have stagnated a bit on progressing with the DLV San Andreas Fault paper. Mostly I've been dealing with slowly digitizing and re-digitizing some of the trench logs. There were 9 trenches! It's challenging because it was strike slip faulting, with pervasive faulting/fracturing and how to represent oblique to the trench fractures that generally reach the surface, but often don't continue with the trench wall due to their obliquity to the surface trace of the fault makes the logs a bit cartoonish when you need to close polygons. It's a compromise and will require some nuanced discussion and different types of figures to completely represent everything. Given the slow do...

Mostly last week was spent tending to Dallas as he recovered from surgery and also doing a bunch of winterization of the house/yard as well as some editing of the TLF paper. Still waiting on a couple of important coauthors to provide feedback before it can be officially submitted. Some coauthors want to submit to GSA Bulletin, which would be cool, but it’s so much money. Just doesn’t seem right to spend so much University money on publishing fees when there are well peer reviewed journals now freely available. But we’ll see. Still thinking about it. Time is flying and I haven’t don’t that much on paper number 2 yet and need to get to it!!! 

This week I finished digitizing four trench logs from the DLV site along the San Andreas fault and created two more trench figures. Some of these I started working on so long ago that the ArcGIS program changed and I needed to redo some of the work. I have three more trench walls to (re)digitize to unify the formatting of the trench units and one more trench figure to produce and then I can get back to finalizing the writing on that paper. I think I should be able to produce a full draft of that paper and send it to colleagues before I turn 45 or at least by the end of the month of October.  This week I also got back edits from D. Johnson on the Thousand Lake fault paper. He provided some really useful edits and I have made the changes. Tomorrow I should be able to finalize some figure edits I wanted to accomplish before sending it to the broader coauthor group for further internal review. I think I will ask that they send back comments by October 16th, with hopes of submitting tha...