July 2026 Updates: Parkfield 2.0 Workshop, Topliff and Cedar Hills Submissions, Thousand Lake Published, and Sabbatical Reading List

The 2026 Summer is more than half over and it is hot here in Orem. The past two days (July 11-12) reached record high temperatures (All time, not daily) and looking at the weather map it was no joke. Afternoon temperatures were between 101 and 112 across the Wasatch Front and over 95 on the Wasatch Back, even in places like Park City! It's still not as hot as Phoenix was and cool enough for recreating pleasantly in the mornings, so I will be thankful for that! 

Summer has been relaxed this year with very little travel for Debjani and me, but it has continued to be productive:

In May, I led a week of our Geology Field capstone course right here along the northern Provo segment of the Wasatch fault zone. Students created a geomorphic/geologic strip map of the fault zone from Cedar Hills (in the North) to Battle Creek Trailhead on the southeast side of the town of Pleasant Grove. Some student maps were really quite impressive (see below - by Parker J.). 

That week of work has led me to renew interest in the story of how wide the WFZ is along the northern Provo segment. Parker J. and Hannah R. and I spent one day in the field investigating evidence for high mountain front faulting below Provo Peak and we hope to do more of this field checking of my lidar mapping later this summer/fall. I plan to present this work at AGU 2026! 

In June, I helped host the SCEC Parkfield 2.0 workshop at Moffett Field, CA along with Bill Ellsworth (Stanford), Roland Burgmann (Berkeley), Cliff Thurber (Wisconsin), Yihe Huang (Michigan), and Andy Barbour (USGS) and myself (Utah Valley - one of these institutions is not like the others...). The workshop included about 75 participants, there were four science sessions, posters and lightning talks, and a panel discussion. Additionally, there were breakout groups at the end of the meeting which was a nice summative way to finish the meeting and may lead into our leadership group writing a paper about science opportunities as we begin to anticipate the occurrence of the next moderate magnitude Parkfield earthquake along the San Andreas fault.

The Thousand Lake fault paper has now officially been published with Geosphere:

Toke et al., 2026. 

I also resubmitted my paper about patterns of land subsidence revealed from lidar differencing in Cedar Valley/Parowan Valleys in Southern Utah. This time, I submitted the manuscript to the Environmental and Engineering Geoscience GSA/AEG journal. 

Finally, I submitted a paper to the journal Seismica about Dr. Bunds and my work studying the history of the Topliff Hill fault zone and its relationship to earthquakes along the Southern Oquirrh Mountains fault. 

Throughout the summer, I have been intermittently meeting with P. Farnworth and V. Richards (UVU Alumni) as we've been working to write a paper for a special issue about Tectonic Geomorphology with the Journal of New Zealand Geology. The paper is about mapping various geomorphic metrics across the entire state of Utah including Ksn, Relief, Sinuosity, and more! 

I also need to get back to finishing up a paper about the paleoaseismology of the Dry Lake Valley site along the creeping section of the San Andreas fault, which I hope to do in the coming weeks. Perhaps there will be more on that in my next blog post. 

I also thought I would publish a list of readings (books - not all the articles required to write these papers!) and listening (audiobooks/podcasts) that I completed over the past year while on sabbatical:

Audiobooks/Podcasts (highlighted ones are major recommends by me!):

• GeologyBites: https://www.geologybites.com/ 
• The 99% Invisible City: https://99percentinvisible.org/category/cities/ 
• How the Earth Works by Michael Wysession
• A New History of Life by Stuart Sutherland
• The Penguin History of New Zealand by Michael King 
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte 
• The Story of Earth by Robert Hazen
• Earth by Richard Fortey
• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy 
• The Big Ones by Lucy Jones 
• Mighty Storms of New England by Eric P. Fisher
• The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates  

Hard Copy Books:

• Active Faults of the World by Robert Yeats (started, wishing for more diagrams, but very good summary! - you need a M.S. in geology to really enjoy this probably)
• The Geology of Earthquakes by Robert Yeats, Kerry Sieh, and Clarence Allen (started, not too far along yet)
• Earthquakes and Young Volcanoes along the Eastern Sierra Nevada by Rinehart and Smith
• Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis 
• Think Again by Adam Grant 
• Build the Life You Want by Brooks and Winfrey
• This is How you Lose Her by Junot Diaz (comedic... okay not astounding)