Professor Toke's Geoscience Blog

This week, I responded to four reviewers’ comments on our Southern Utah Land Subsidence paper. Comments were substantial, but not too onerous. The paper is being looked over by David Munsey and I should be able to resubmit it by the start of next week! Then, I’ll get back to finalizing the Topliff paper or continue working on the central SAF paper. I also had an organizing meeting as we worked to post an announcement for the Parkfield 2.0 SCEC workshop that will take place this June in the Bay Area. 

I completed a draft of the Topliff Hill fault zone paleoseismology paper and sent it off to my primary coauthor Dr Bunds for feedback today. It took about a month to write this paper. Along with other ongoing stuff. Feeling pretty good about it overall.  Yesterday I received feedback from four peer reviewers on the paper I wrote based upon work with David Munsey: LiDAR differencing to explore ground subsidence in southern Utah. The feedback was pretty critical. Seems like the reviewers really wanted it to be a methods paper, but it’s really a case study and explorative paper about what’s possible to see with LiDAR differencing with ground subsidence. I’ll see what I can do to appease them and if it doesn’t work out I’ll find a journal that’s more about geology than remote sensing methods. 

This week I used ScarpVS to analyze ~120 fault displacements across various geomorphic fan surfaces along the Topliff Hills Fault (and S Oquirrh Mtns FZ) which are just west of the Wasatch Front. Mike Bunds and I (along with 2019 Field Camp students) trenched this fault and have loose constrains on the ages of 4-6 earthquakes, so this work complements the trench study. I’ve already got 5 figures, 1 table and a few pages of writing done. Here is a summary of the displacement information along the fault: