It's been a while since I've posted here, so here's an attempt to catch up (in a rambly, notes-to-self sort of fashion) -- four things in chronological order:
1) AGU
This year's Fall AGU meeting was chockablock with good stuff. As usual, the whole thing was a bit of a sensory-overload blur, but here are the main things that struck me:
- Noise. Lots of stuff about seismic noise. A number of presentations on the use of seismic noise to calculate an equivalent seismogram between two stations, using cross-correlation -- seems weird at first, then starts to make sense when you think about it. The idea is that if the noise you're recording at your seismic stations reflects a bunch of randomly distributed sources coming from all sides, then some of that noise will actually be picked up more than one station, and will show up as correlated noise between the two -- but it'll be affected by the propagation path from one station to the other. Averaging over all directions, then, the cross-correlated noise spectrum ends up looking very much like a seismogram! Seismology without sources -- groovy.
- More noise -- specifically, the Earth's "hum". Apparently there's a part of the seismic noise spectrum that can be localized to the oceans, and has seasonal variability -- during stormy times of year, the ocean is actually communicating significant seismic energy to the solid Earth.
- Another rather startling result is that it seems to be possible to predict how big an earthquake is going to be before it's finished happening -- at least, that's what's implied by the ability to predict an earthquake's magnitude by the first 4-5 seconds of its arrival. I wonder if this breaks down at very high magnitudes?
- Lots more stuff that was of immediate interest to me -- there does seem to be a difference between eastern and western Ontario in more data sets than just ours. The Superior Province isn't so uniform after all.
2) The Sumatra earthquake and tsunami
The biggest earthquake, and perhaps the worst natural disaster, to happen in my lifetime. I found myself alternating between being appalled and being professionally fascinated -- that thing was huge, as the calculated rupture on the USGS website shows. So many preventable deaths; with a warning system in place, I'd guess at least half of the dead could've been saved. The size and type of the earthquake are about the same as that of the Cascadia megathrust that B.C. and the Pacific Northwest are, with good reason, worried about -- this could've been us, too, and one day it will be.
3) POLARIS Ontario workshop
Two weeks ago, there was a workshop on the Ontario project I'm participating in, out in Kingston. A small meeting, but a good mix of people, and a friendly venue in which to introduce my grad student to the milieu, I thought. There was some interest in our result that there's a change between eastern and western Ontario -- everything interesting seems to be happening in the middle of a gap in which there aren't any stations, so hopefully some will be put in to plug the hole. I should really post on that result, incidentally.
4) Term, again
This term, I'm teaching Exploration Seismology, and generating much of it from scratch in the process. It's a lot of work, but an interesting sort of work, and hopefully it'll save me a bunch of time and effort next year. Practical courses like this are a balancing act -- I want to get the theory right, but I also want the students to learn some immediately useful skills for the working world. A lot of our students are going into the oil industry nowadays -- part of our role is to help their job prospects, after all.
It does feel a bit precarious, trying to teach a reasonably complete geophysics program with only two geophysics faculty. But I think we do a creditable job, overall, and my colleague Ian deserves the bulk of the credit for that -- he even carried the whole program himself for a brief period. I have no idea how he managed.
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