My Research.. in some detail (liitle, but some)

Crustal Structure Along the Transantarctic Mountain Front Using Receiver Functions

What am I doing? Well, in a nutshell the goal is to investigate Earth's structure along the Western front of the Transantarctic Mountains (TAM). To do this I had to compute Receiver Functions (RF) for teleseismic (far far away) earthquakes of a magnitude 5.5 or higher. Then I am using the H-kappa stacking method to get an idea of crustal thickness and Poisson's Ratio (gives idea of bulk composition). For more details on all this stuff keep on reading

Images: The one on the left (Lawrence et al. 2006) shows Antarctica with locations of the 3 TAMSEIS arrays. The image on the right (dont know where it came from) labels where the mountains are.

Here are more details on...

Transantarctic Mountains: They BIG! Its ~3500km long, 200km wide mountain range that divides the East Antarctic Craton from the West Antarctic Rift System (see map above). Peaks rise over 4000m (13,000+ ft) with the highest being just above 4500m. One interesting thing to note about this is that unlike other mountain ranges of similar size, TAM shows no evidence of a compressional origin (continents, things colliding into each other) -- which is in part why we doing what we doing to see how TAM formed.

Do you want to know about Receiver Fuctions? Sure you do!
RFs are computed from a 3 component (N-S, E-W, Vert) seismometers to show the relative response of Earth's structure near the seismometer. What do they look like: (image taken from Chuck Ammon's website - http://eqseis.geosc.psu.edu/~cammon/HTML/RftnDocs/rftn01.html)

This is what they look like when the come out to be really pretty (above is a synthetic)... which in my case they havent. So you know what youre looking at. The direct Pwave is well, the direct Pwave. The Ps wave is a P wave that get converted to a S wave due to a velocity contrast in layer. The other two waves (PpPhs and PpShs + PsShs) are simply multiples that are reverberating in the crust. To see their travel paths go to the website listed above.

H-kappa stacking: This gives us an idea of the crustal thickness and Poisson's ratio. Do you really want to know more? Here is the equation it solves

Zhu and Kanamori (2000)

where r(t) is the radial RF, t1,2,3 are the arrival times of the Ps and crustal reverberations arrival times and w is a weight assigned to the RF. Ok, thats all you need to know.

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Good news! I have officially been PQ'd (physically qualified)!!!!! Weird thing about it though is that they told me I wouldnt be PQd until I took care of all of my dental work befrehand but I guess since I called them the just took my word that I would get it done so now Im good to go!

I did just get my wisdom teeth cut out. It went well. I havent had to take any of the pain medication and the swelling is very little. My face was pretty numb for most of the day but its getting better now. I could use some chipotle tho...

Alright, thanks for reading. Remember --

If at first you dont succeed... It must be someone else's fault.

Find them.

Blame them.

Make them pay.