announcing a summer school: Understanding Earth-Surface Processes in the Alpine Environment from High Resolution Topography

I am happy to be working with a great team on the

Understanding Earth-Surface Processes in the Alpine Environment from High Resolution Topography: European Geosciences Union Summer School 2013

Paolo Tarolli is our leader. It should be a fun school and quite interesting to catch up on the latest science and technology.

Collecting some links on the North Korean nuclear test

Valuable information about North Korea's nuclear test comes from seismological recordings of the shock waves produced in the event.

One of the interesting things is that because the North Korean nuclear tests are basically done in the same place, seismograms of the events at long distances have quite similar characteristics. Their amplitudes, however, do vary with the increasing yield of the events.

Here are a few links I have come across:

• Physics Today commentary
• IRIS Special event page on the event
• IRIS Recent Earthquake Teachable Moments on the event
• US Geological Survey report on the event
• NORSAR records of the last three DPRK nuclear tests (2006, 2009, and 2013)
• Comparison for the nearest real-time broadband seismometer (in China) for 2009 and 2013 nuclear tests (by Andy Frassetto, IRIS)

How do we know it was an explosion and not an earthquake? First of all, that part of North Korea is not known for historic earthquakes. Secondly and more to the point, with seismometers arrayed around the source area regionally and globally, the explosion will cause all of the first motions to be AWAY from the source. If it is an earthquake, two quadrants will be pulled IN towards the source and two quadrants will be pulled out ("double couple").

--disclaimer: this is not my area of expertise, but I do find it fascinating. To some degree, monitoring of nuclear tests using seismology has driven the development of seismology and seismic networks and that lets us learn a lot more about earthquakes globally.

Paleoanthropology research in the Afar, Ethiopia

I just got back from some fun field work in the Afar, Ethiopia. Here are some pictures. Our project there is called the Ledi-Geraru Research project. The research is done in collaboration with Kaye Reed and Chris Campisano from the Institute of Human Origins / School of Human Evolution and Social Change as well as with Ph.D. students Erin DiMaggio and Dominique Garello. Erin is just finishing up a substantial Ph.D. effort on the geology, stratigraphy, and tephrachronology of rare Pliocene units (about 2.9-2.7 Ma) that critically span a time gap otherwise mostly missing in the region. Dominique will be working with Chris Campisano and I on the geology of the Ledi-Geraru, as well as this drilling project.

Here are a few other posts on this topic:
We started this project with Charlie Lockwood and miss the chance to share its successes with him.
Here is an old page with maps
Here are many pictures from over the years:
Ethiopia and Afar region (2002)
Ethiopia and Afar region (2004)
Ethiopia and Afar region (2005)
Ethiopia and Afar region (2006)
Ethiopia and Afar region (May 2008)
Web-sized images for Ethiopia and Afar region (November 2008); Ethiopia and Afar region (November 2008) full size images
Web-sized images for Hadar Field School (2009); Hadar Field School full size images
Afar region 2012
Afar region 2013

OpenTopography update at AGU 2012

At the fall 2012 American Geophysical Union meeting, I represented OpenTopography at the New lidar technologies and vision for the future town hall along with our colleagues from the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping as well as Chris Crosby and the TLS program at UNAVCO.

Thanks to all who attended. It was a nice forum to talk about LiDAR as supported by the EAR program at the National Science Foundation (Thanks especially to Russ Kelz).

Here is my presentation which provides a very short update on OpenTopography and our renewal: pptx pdf. Here is an MP4 of my practice from the night before (not the greatest clarity but gets the point across: 13 Mb MP4)

Tours in Google Earth around Arizona highlight aspects of its geology

As a part of my final set of lectures for the 2012 Structural Geology class, I used my Camtasia to record some fly overs of Arizona from inside Google Earth.

In the first video (29 Mb MP4 format video file or on youtube), I tour from inside the Grand Canyon to around Flagstaff, Prescott and Jerome and finish over south Phoenix.

In the second video (29 Mb MP4 format video file or on youtube), I tour from the White Mountains of eastern Arizona over to Phoenix and on down to finish above Tucson.

These videos are not narrated, but they are then embedded in the narrated lecture on the Cordilleran geologic history (post Eocene) that I developed for the class (look around 20 minutes):
Tectonic history of the western North American Cordillera (from Eocene) ppt
video narration--big file (100MB)--may need to right click and save to local disk. Lecture narrated video on Youtube

videos

I hope these might be useful for others.

Structure from Motion mapping

I have been fascinated with high resolution imaging for a while. This post accumulates a few files and links to present some recent activities.

The main effort lately has been part of a collaboration with Sri Saripalli and Ed Nissen to use the tools of Structure from Motion to make high resolution digital elevation models and texture maps.

We have been using AgiSoft to make topographic models from our uncontrolled aerial photography.

Here is a powerpoint I presented at the 2012 SCEC meeting: ppt
Here is a poster from Ed Nissen presented at the 2012 AGU meeting: pdf

This video shows the result of a moderate resolution computation and then export of the texture map to KMZ:

Here is a direct link to the video in mp4 format: link

Dallas Rhodes and I played around with an AR Drone. It was pretty neat, but hard to fly as you can see in this video:

Here is a direct link to the video in mp4 format: link

Here are a couple of links that go along with our kit:
Balloon and kite photography systems
The Auto kite site in the research group of Professor Saripalli

L'Aquila forum in SESE

At the suggestion of J-F Smekens, we organized a forum to discuss the L'Aquila earthquakes and the prosecution of scientists whose "...reassuring statements [before the mainshock were] widely interpreted to be an anti-alarm" (T. Jordan). The discussion was animated! Thanks to all who joined!

Here is the powerpoint with the discussion materials: pdf pptx

Here is information about the Motivazione from the judge justifiying his decision: link

Here is a link from our INGV colleagues accumulating many relevant documents: http://processoaquila.wordpress.com/.