Professor Toke's Geoscience Blog

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...

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...

Week 6 of the fall semester is half over and it feels like the moment to write this week's post: This week's GE committee meeting (Wednesday afternoon) covered editing a substitution request form, addressing an individual case and working through committee bylaws as well.  Last weekend I finished a full draft of Chapter 2 of the Advanced GIS Book, 4 more chapters to write. I need to figure out how to get some peer-review on this book and how to post it once it's complete.  This week, I started digging into my Dry Lake Valley Paleoseismic Site paper that I began writing about 9 years ago. I've already got a great abstract, introduction, methods, three tables, six of the eleven figures done. The big hurdle is going to be making all the trench figures and slogging through writing about those results, a lot of the stratigraphy/photos/logging observations are boring/less than satisfactory but it also needs to be published, showing all that null data (no earthquakes, lots of ...