Spring 2026 - Week 1 - IAG Presentation Prepared and Parkfield 2.0 Workshop Participation

Happy to report that it has finally become winter in northern Utah. December and early January's abnormally high temperatures (50 degrees nearly every day) have dipped to a seasonal 35 and it even snowed (a little). We need snowpack for our long dry and warm summers! Cannot say I didn't enjoy my gravel bike riding along the Bonneville shoreline this past week, but this is the time of year bike trainers were made for. Grateful to have had a restful break without the grind of prepping classes in just two weeks. Instead I was able to finish a draft of the Advanced GIS Textbooklet which Dr. Olson is utilizing in his class and I prepared my talk for the IAG meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand at the beginning of next month. (abstract can be found here: https://confer.eventsair.com/iag2026 ). After getting some feedback from the coauthors, I will probably upload a version of the talk to my YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/@nathantoke5266  For now, here is a screen capture of the lead slide:

In other news, I was invited by Bill Ellsworth, Roland Burgmann and Cliff Thurber to help join the organizing group for their recently funded SCEC workshop titled Parkfield 2.0. The workshop should take place in April or May and bring together about 40 earthquake scientists to consider what new science opportunities exist from further study of Parkfield. Parkfield, California was famous for it's earthquake prediction experiment in the 1980s and 1990s and finally had the long expected earthquake in 2004 while I was working on my Masters Thesis studying the earthquake geology of the area. Now it has been more than 20 years since that earthquake and it is quite likely to have another moderate magnitude ~6 event sometime in the next decade(s). So there certainly are opportunities for more data gathering and model testing! Should be fun and informative and it is an honor to get to work with so many esteemed earthquake scientists! 

Over the next two weeks, before I am finalizing packing for New Zealand, I hope to get enough of a draft together for the Topliff Hills Paleoseismology paper that I can send it to Dr. Bunds for initial review and comments. In New Zealand, I plan to just enjoy the conference, the field trips, some gravel biking in Queenstown, and the nice warm southern hemisphere (First time across the Equator for me!). 

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