Some new San Andreas Fault tour videos of 1 m bare earth hillshades

I have been preparing a lecture and I built some new simple videos flying along the San Andreas Fault. The videos are made by me flying along in Google Earth with 1 m hillshades produced from lidar topography data collected along the San Andreas Fault. The videos are on youtube in this play list: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFfZSFyNZ_jZm86F1TsnYfuuYNef_Uh21. I also put the MP4s in this folder--they are numbered 1-8 from NW-SE.

The flights follow generally along the San Andreas Fault from Point Arena to the southern Carrizo Plain (Dragon's Back and Northern Elkhorn Hills):

The data were processed at www.opentopography.org and come from 3 really cool datasets:

• EarthScope Northern California Lidar Project. Data collected by National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping.
• B4 project: southern San Andreas Fault laser scan. Data collected by National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping in collaboration with USGS, UNAVCO, and Ohio State University.
• Dragons Back Ridge: San Andreas Fault, California acquisition. Data collected by National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping in collaboration with George Hilley.

Simple Topography Lectures at University of Geneva as part of CERG-C

I am visiting the University of Geneva as part of the CERG-C project. Professor Costanza Bonadonna is the leader of the activity which is a course on hazard and risk with an international group of students. They have been in Geneva for a few weeks for classroom work and starting tomorrow they go to Vulcano Island for practical experience. I am going to join.

I gave a lecture and a practical demonstration on the general topic of Topography, but trying to emphasize its fundamental value for science and applied value for hazard assessment. And, of course making the point that high resolution data are most useful.

Here are the pdfs to my lectures and demo:

• Introduction to topography
• Earthquakes and Faults 101--includes IRIS animations
• Sharpening our view of Earth processes with high resolution topography
• Demonstration:
• Large scale topography and bathymetry--demoing GeoMapApp
• Vulcano topography and the Energy Line
• Point clouds--including data from Sunset Crater National Monument on OpenTopography

New report: NASA Challenges and Opportunities for Research in Earth Surface and Interiors

The new report: NASA Challenges and Opportunities for Research in Earth Surface and Interiors has just been released officially. The main link to download is here: PDF.

I was honored to be on the writing team and contributed to the surface process, human activities, topography, increasingly interconnected world, and professional development portions. We were charged with revisiting and updating the 2002 Solid Earth Science Working Group report “Living on a Restless Planet” (the SESWG Report). The update follows the SESWG framework and updates on many of the science and technology topics and will help to chart NASA Earth Sciences and Interiors priorities.

Thanks to the rest of the committee, our co chairs James Davis and Louise Kellogg, and Ben Phillips from NASA.

Exploring topographic response to interacting surface processes and rock uplift: the Dragon's Back Pressure Ridge along the San Andreas Fault, Carrizo Plain, CA

The Dragon's Back Pressure Ridge is an amazing landform along the San Andreas Fault in the Carrizo Plain of California. A recent paper in Science by Hurst, et al. examined it to explore how hillslope form might be used to indicate waxing and waning responses to a pulse of rock uplift. George Hilley (a coauthor on the recent paper) and I along with David Pollard and Dallas D. Rhodes have spent more than 20 years pondering and exploring the Dragon's Back. With this blog entry I want to highlight a few links for more information.

This is the main published paper on the Dragon's Back up to now: Hilley, G. E., and Arrowsmith J R., Geomorphic response to uplift along the Dragon's Back pressure ridge, Carrizo Plain, California, Geology, v. 36; no. 5; p. 367–370; doi: 10.1130/G24517A.1, 2008.

Ph.D. theses:

• Arrowsmith, JR, 1995, Coupled Tectonic Deformation and Geomorphic Degrada tion along the San Andreas Fault Zone [Dissertation thesis]: Stanford, Stanford University.
• Hilley, G. E., 2001, Landscape development of tectonically active areas [Dissertation thesis]: Arizona State University.

Hillshades and digital elevation model (B4 project data processed by OpenTopography):

• Hillshade for Google Earth (KMZ)
• Poster-sized view of the Dragon's Back
• Dragon's Back 1 m Digital Surface Model and ArcMap project and simplified movie (latter from George Hilley)

Other links:

• A review of early investigations along the San Andreas Fault in the Carrizo Plain (from Arrowsmith, 1995)
• Field photographs I
• San Andreas Fault tour video (shows location)
• Dragons Back ArcScene movie 1, Dragons Back ArcScene movie 2, Dragons Back ArcScene movie 3
• Lecture on Understanding geomorphic response to uplift: Dragon's Back Pressure Ridge
• Field video overview of the Dragon's Back (low quality video)
• Examples from a short course on high resolution topography. See also this video.

The digital elevation models that enabled much of the analysis discussed here come from the B4 project and the data and models are available from OpenTopography.
The B4 project created an unprecedentedly accurate surface model along the San Andreas and San Jacinto Faults in southern California that enabled the research reported here. It was supported by the U. S. National Science Foundation and led by Ohio State University and the U. S. Geological Survey. The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping performed the airborne data acquisition and laser data processing. Optech International generously contributed use of the ALTM3100 laser scanner system. UNAVCO and SCIGN assisted in GPS ground control and continuous high rate GPS data acquisition. A group of volunteers from USGS, UCSD, UCLA, Caltech and private industry, as well as gracious landowners along the fault zones, also made the project possible.