Professor Toke's Geoscience Blog

Bulleted List: -Submitted the Thousand Lake fault MS to Geosphere.  -Attended the 2025-2026 USHE geology major meeting, representing UVU. Was a good meeting overall. Sad to see some Utah programs having trouble replacing retired faculty (Utah Tech especially who is kind of down to 1-2 one faculty members at the moment). -Attended the last GE committee meeting of the semester where we finalized and approved the committee bylaws.  -Reviewed my IAG conference abstract and began planning my talk which will take place on Feb 5 in Christchurch NZ in the Tectonic Geomorphology of Mountains Session.  -read a recent Geosphere paper about the east Traverse Mountains by the BYU group studying mega landslides want to reread it a bit, certainly interesting.  -listened to my first undergraduate research mentor Keith Klepeis on Geology Bites. how awesome!!! Third professor I know that has appeared on that program.  -Started a book about the history of New Zealand.  -Worke...

This past week, I completed figure and text edits and reformatted the Thousand Lake fault manuscript for submission to a GSA journal (Geosphere) instead of Seismica (kept the old version just in case). Unfortunately, I feel that the open-access charge for GSA Bulletin is too expensive to justify submitting there, but Geosphere should reach a similar audience which is broader in scope than Seismica. I sent the reformatted version out for a last check with co-authors and hopefully will have a submission receipt with GSA by mid week.  I also started (opened and made the cover page) for Chapter 4 of the Advanced GIS book. This follows upon meeting with Dr. Olson in detail about the class this past week. I hope to finish the book (at least the first 5 chapters) in just a few weeks, so time to push hard toward that.  Biking was good again this past week and I've steadily been pushing up my weekly vertical climbing, reached over 7000 ft for the week (about as much as one day of the T...

Whoa, getting behind in posting this sabbatical blog/journal. This post covers the last week of October and first week of November (through the following weekend).  I attended two department meetings in a row, one in person and the second over TEAMs. The motivation was just to touch base and being 1/3 of the way through the sabbatical I also wanted to light a motivational fire for myself. It worked. I was amazed by the nitty gritty details of the two meetings and how frustrating all the little things can be, especially when they have so little to do with teaching or research. Most things at meeting seem to have to do with service and/or administration which is mostly satisfying the ideas of others outside of the department and even the University. Anyway, I am pretty convinced that most of that stuff is to keep faculty away from doing anything academic. It's basically a war against knowledge coming down from above. So mission accomplished, I need to relish this time where those tho...