First Few Days at CERI (Tuesday May 29 - Thursday May 31)
CERI stands for Center for Earthquake Research and Information. For those of you who haven't heard how I got this gig, my mom works with a woman named Linda and was telling her about how I want to be a geophysicist. She told my mom her sister was a geophysics professor at the University of Memphis, and got me in contact. I talked to Chris Powell for a few months, and she offered me an internship down here for the summer.
The specific problem I am working on involves gravity and magnetic anomalies. There is a part of Tennessee that has a low gravity anomaly paired with a high magnetic anomaly. Chris says people have been confused about it for years, trying to figure out what kind of rocks have high magnetic fields but low densities. However, she believes the low gravity anomaly is a result of flexure of the crust and the way the gravity anomaly is calculated.
So for the first two-and-a-half days I pretty much read textbooks, familiarizing myself with flexure and how to calculate it.
Like I have said before, CERI is actually in five separate house-sized buildings. My building mostly has no walls, and there are cubicle-like partitions for much of it. You first walk in and there's a lounge-type area, with fridge, microwave, and table. Keep going and there's an area to your left with four desk-type things up against the partitions; two of them are mine, two of them are Duayne's (who works for Chuck, Chris's husband. He's doing work on reflection data). Keep going and you're in the computer area, with five computers and three Sun systems (Sunblade something or other). Other than that, outside there's one of those large poles with many arrows pointing to various points of interest and the distance there, such as Mt. St. Helens, the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the South Pole, Japan, and the CERI Fish Fry.
The specific problem I am working on involves gravity and magnetic anomalies. There is a part of Tennessee that has a low gravity anomaly paired with a high magnetic anomaly. Chris says people have been confused about it for years, trying to figure out what kind of rocks have high magnetic fields but low densities. However, she believes the low gravity anomaly is a result of flexure of the crust and the way the gravity anomaly is calculated.
So for the first two-and-a-half days I pretty much read textbooks, familiarizing myself with flexure and how to calculate it.
Like I have said before, CERI is actually in five separate house-sized buildings. My building mostly has no walls, and there are cubicle-like partitions for much of it. You first walk in and there's a lounge-type area, with fridge, microwave, and table. Keep going and there's an area to your left with four desk-type things up against the partitions; two of them are mine, two of them are Duayne's (who works for Chuck, Chris's husband. He's doing work on reflection data). Keep going and you're in the computer area, with five computers and three Sun systems (Sunblade something or other). Other than that, outside there's one of those large poles with many arrows pointing to various points of interest and the distance there, such as Mt. St. Helens, the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the South Pole, Japan, and the CERI Fish Fry.