Merry Christmas...and more dinosaurs :)

If you haven't been to the "From Wolf to Woof" exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History...you certainly need to go, it's pretty amazing and is over in mid-January!! Here are some pics of our recent visit. Man, JM looooves the "dinosaur museum" so much!

OK Earthquakes!!

On Wednesday I was lucky enough to be able to go to the field and deploy seismometers to monitor the earthquake activity. Seems like everything has been tapering off, so that's good news, but I did feel another one last night at 1130. Yikes! Here are some pictures of the seismometers, they are little canisters that we were burying, and then all the electronics sit outside the hole in a pelican box with a solar panel that is used to recharge the marine battery that runs the stuff. These are telemetry, they (the geologic survey and my other colleagues at the school of geology) have to come back out to the field and download the data manually. These will probably sit out in the field for three months or so, barring no more earthquakes!

We were driving trying to find a particular location, and we drove over a ground rupture in a road along the fault! We know it was due to the fault because along the margins of the fault there were little "mud volcanoes", which form during the quake when mud is forced up through the rupture.

This particular deployment was with equipment from PASSCAL, which is an NSF funded endeavor at New Mexico Tech. You can essentially "rent" all kinds of geophysical equipment from them, a really awesome place. So they sent OU 10 seismometers to put out along the fault. Some students and a prof from OSU also came out to help us. We also were helped out by some local critters, as you'll see in the pics. One tried to hitch a ride back with us...let me tell you, I think she would work harder than some of the people around here :)

All in all its been a pretty exciting/scary week. This fault system was last active over 300 million years ago, and looks like the most recent activity is starting to taper off. Earthquakes are not unusual here in OK, and lots of research will be ongoing from this latest 'swarm' of events.

Day Out with Thomas!

So John Milo is a huge Thomas the Tank Engine fan (as are most of his friends at school). The actual real-life Thomas was coming through OKC to the Railway Museum. I thought this would blow his mind and he would be so excited. Turns out I was the only one super excited and JM was terrified of Thomas, as you can see in the pictures. With about 5 minutes left in the ride, JM perks up, looks out the window and exclaims "Yea! We're riding Thomas' caboose!". Ohhhh kiddo. The railway museum was very very cool, and we'll definitely be headed back there. They have both a Halloween and a Christmas train (which he may not be ready for based on this experience). Hopefully he'll still love Thomas next year. We did get a book of the original stories, of which he is a huge fan, and a new train toy, so it wasn't a total wash! Plus, John and I had a ton of fun :)

The Fair...and the science musuem...and the zoo

So it's fair time in Oklahoma...my favorite festivity!! John Milo and I went twice, once with Dad and once with Lily and Lisa. We've also been to the science museum a few times and the zoo. Here are some random pics for our recent outings. John also enjoyed himself at the science museum...as you can see in the picture where he is all alone (no kids), building a block tower!

Colorado (again)!

We just got back from our working vacation in Colorado. I won't bore you with any pictures of my research, although suffice it to say we were able to see some awesome rocks and I'll have a busy fall sampling season for sure. John and JM had a good time checking out the dinosaur museum and Garden of the Gods, but those pics are on John's phone, so I'll have to post those later. We can start with our stop in Boise City to play on the jungle gym to give JM a break from the car. He did wonderful, by the way, and was quite the joy to travel with (this time). Also included is a view of a large prairie dog town in the OK panhandle (this is for Uncle Ed and Bill).

After we were done with sampling around Colorado Springs we headed up to my advisor's cabin in Granby, which is 40 miles west of Winter Park. We played golf at the Grand Lake course, it was JM's first full round. He had a ton of fun!

The cabin is right outside of Rocky Mountain National Park. We decided to take a drive up there. It was John's first National Park visit! JM's too, but he slept through the whole thing. We topped out at 12,183 feet and it was cold up there! What a welcome relief from all the heat back home. We saw a few elk, but no bears.

You can see the Paternoster lakes if you look hard in this picture. A little geology lesson, if you know your latin, Paternoster refers to the Lord's Prayer. These lakes are glacial lakes that are connected by streams, making them look like rosary beads (in map view), hence their name. They were beautiful.

We went back to Grand Lake afterwards and walked around the piers as well as played some putt-putt, which JM loved!!

On our way back home we stopped by the Denver Aquarium. This was an extremely mind-blowing trip for JM. I'm sure he'll enjoy it later on as well when he actually will remember it! His picture that looks like extreme fear is just him in awe of some sharks swimming around.

We saw some amazing storms moving across the Kansas plains on the way home. This is looking east toward Goodland and Colby. This storm produced some high winds (65+) as well as golf ball sized hail. It had beautiful structure and it was amazing to watch its evolution. The second one was actually in Nebraska, and fizzled out fairly quickly, although it still laid down some strong winds!