my final fall semester of undergrad (hopefully. oh god, i sure hope so) starts monday! i’m excited and nervous because it’s going to be SUPER busy but full of things i love. this semester’s “the big one” because i’m applying to grad schools, which involves the whole application process and also stuff like taking the GRE. i’m tutoring again but also TAing an intro lab, which i’m super excited about!! since my goal is to be a professor, getting more teaching experience and getting to instruct a whole class is going to be really good practice for me. i’m doing a LOT of research—i’m presenting last year’s stratigraphy project at the GSA conference in october, working on a new project out in the chihuahua desert, and helping out with a more local project. the local project is cool because it’s a whole team; a dam is about to be put in place that will flood the outcrop, so we’re basically rushing to extract as much data as possible first. it’s also a super cool outcrop because it seems to have been a transitional environment from swamp to marine and was downhill from most of the things around it, so we’re finding things like charcoal from local forest fires in layers! it’s also so rich in plant fossils that one of the team members is doing nothing but messing with hundreds of plant samples (idk how he has time for anything else, he’s literally ALWAYS in the paleo lab). my research in the desert is going to involve comparing the geochemistry and lithology of the cobbles in a conglomerate to their source to better understand deposition in the area (it’s a VERY strange situation out where i’m working!). i love geochemistry and even though sedimentary rocks are my least favorite kind of rock i always dive headfirst into research and find myself having a blast. i’m nervous about applying to grad schools.. my transcript’s a mess due to the health issues i was dealing with for a couple years, but i do have a lot of research experience as well as the tutoring and TA jobs working in my favor. we’ll see! i’ve decided that if i can find a mentor who can work on it with me i’d like to specialize in plutons in mountain arcs, especially looking at reinjection and magma mingling and how the history of magma movement is preserved in deformation. i’m reading papers about it to get more background knowledge and it’s super fun because i love learning more about the topic! it’s also so rewarding to read a paper talking about concepts that would have gone over my head two years ago and feel like i’m totally following. :) i’m hoping to start reaching out to potential advisors in the next few months and seeing if any can meet up with me at GSA (and hopefully the fact that i’m presenting comes off as a bit impressive—not sure, but it definitely won’t hurt!). i’m really lucky in that both my parents went to grad school, so i have a ton of help figuring all of this out. it would definitely be overwhelming on my own! i’m also getting closer with my friends in the geology department (many of whom are working on the big group project) so i’ve been getting a lot more social time in lately, which feels amazing. i didn’t realize how isolated i was feeling until i broke out of it! i’ve been feeling super optimistic and i think i'm in a good place to start this semester ^_^

 

 
feasting bears! brooks falls is starting to get a lot of jumping salmon the past few days, which means more bears!

field camp was AMAZING! i went to a three week camp with another school, so it was a little intense because i was joining a capstone course without the same experience everyone else had (i was the only outside student!). i had a ton of fun and learned a lot, plus i made a really cool friend! our first project was mapping the legendary poleta folds, an area in the white mountains of california specifically set aside for geology training—the science as a whole has agreed not to make maps of the area public so that students have to map it themselves. it was a really challenging area with lots of strange faulting. i did pretty well, but there’s one hill that i simplified down to a thrust fault because i had NO IDEA what was going on and it turned out it’s a weird series of normal faults.

 
↑ the poleta folds

our second project was a strat column of ash and lake sediment layers. i missed a lot of points for silly things but my interpretation was pretty solid! i definitely don’t want to work in volcanology though, i spent the whole day getting silica dust in my eyes

after that we mapped an ore-bearing series of quartz veins in the aurora volcanics. this project was NOT for me. at this point i’d already realized that mapping is not my thing, and the project was done in conjunction with a mining company. i got a steak dinner out of it but i don’t even eat steak T_T it ended up being a little over focused on economic geology, and i just could not get myself to care

the last project was my favorite! we toured the eastern sierra nevadas and had to come up with a big-picture schematic cross section to explain the emplacement/stratigraphy of the area. this is the kind of geology i want to do! i’m hoping to study how rocks are deposited and i want to focus on large scales, particularly on mountain ranges, so this was the perfect assignment for me. it showed in my grade—this is what i did the best on!


↑ my schematic cross section!

overall i think i got what i set out to get out of the course; i’ve gained a LOT of field skills and can now locate myself on a topo map, which i thought i’d never figure out. i feel like it was a super valuable experience and it was a huge bonus that the group i went with was so wonderful! although i was exhausted by the end i almost wished for one more week 

bear cams go live at 11am alaska time today! 

upcoming update: i have a ton i want to share about field camp! will try to compose a post soon 

Pandora, Worrying About What She Is Doing, Finds a Way into the Valley through the Scrub Oak
from Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

Look how messy this wilderness is. Look at this scrub oak, chaparro, the chaparral was named for it and consists of it mixed up with a lot of other things, but look at this shrub of it right here now. The tallest limb or stem is about four feet tall, but most of the stems are only a foot or two. One of them looks as if it had been cut off with a tool, a clean slice across, but who? what for? This shrub isn't good for anything, and this ridge isn't on the way to anywhere. A lot of the smaller branch-ends look broken or bitten off. Maybe deer browse the leafbuds. The little grey branches and twigs grow every which way, many dead and lichened, crossing each other, choking each other out. Digger-pine needles, spiders' threads, dead bay leaves are stuck in the branches. It's a mess. It's littered. It has no overall shape. Most of the stems come up from one area, but not all; there's no center and no symmetry. A lot of sticks sticking up out of the ground a little ways with leaves on some of them—that describes it fairly well. The leaves themselves show some order, they seem to obey some laws, poorly. They are all different sizes from about a quarter of an inch to an inch long, but each is enough like the others that one could generalise an ideal scrub oak leaf: a dusty, medium dark-green color, with a slight convex curve to the leaf, which pillows up a bit between the veins that run slanting outward from the central vein; and the edge is irregularly serrated, with a little spine at each apex. These leaves grow irregularly spaced on alternate sides of their twig up to the top, where they crowd into a bunch, a sloppy rosette. Under the litter of dead leaves, its own and others', and moss and rocks and mold and junk, the shrub must have a more or less shrub-shaped complex of roots, going fairly deep, probably deeper than it stands aboveground, because wet as it is here now in February, it will be bone dry on this ridge in summer. There are no acorns left from last fall, if this shrub is old enough to have borne them. It probably is. It could be two years old or twenty or who knows? It is an oak, but a scrub oak, a low oak, a no-account oak, and there are at least a hundred very much like it in sight from this rock I am sitting on, and there are hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands more on this ridge and the next ridge, but numbers are wrong. They are in error. You don't count scrub oaks. When you can count them, something has gone wrong. You can count how many are in a hundred square yards and multiply, if you're a botanist, and so make a good estimate, a fair guess, but you cannot count the scrub oaks on this ridge, let alone the ceanothus, buckbrush, or wild lilac, which I have not mentioned, and the other variously messy and humble components of the chaparral. The chaparral is like atoms and the components of atoms: it evades. It is innumerable. It is not accidentally but essentially messy. This shrub is not beautiful, not even if I were ten feet high on hashish would it be mystical, nor is it nauseating; if a philosopher found it so, that would be his problem, but nothing to do with the scrub oak. This thing is nothing to do with us. This thing is wilderness. The civilised human mind's relation to it is imprecise, fortuitous, and full of risk. There are no shortcuts. All the analogies run in one direction, our direction. There is a hideous little tumor in one branch. The new leaves, this year's growth, are so large and symmetrical compared with the older leaves that I took them at first for part of another plant, a toyon growing in with the dwarf oak, but a summer's dry heat no doubt will shrink them down and warp them. Analogies are easy; the live oak, the humble evergreen, can certainly be made into a sermon, just as it can be made into firewood. Read or burnt. Sermo, I read; I read scrub oak. But I don't, and it isn't here to be read, or burnt. It is casting a shadow across the page of this notebook in the weak sunshine of three-thirty of a February afternoon in Northern California. When I close the book and go, the shadow will not be on the page, though I have drawn a line around it; only the pencil line will be on the page. The shadow will be then on the dead-leaf-thick messy ground or on the mossy rock my ass is on now, and the shadow will move lawfully and with great majesty as the earth turns. The mind can imagine that shadow of a few leaves falling in the wilderness; the mind is a wonderful thing. But what about all the shadows of all the other leaves on all the other branches on all the other scrub oaks on all the other ridges of all the wilderness? If you could imagine those even for a moment, what good would it do? Infinite good.

 
a fold hinge! this is in a highly deformed limestone. the deformation is likely due to a large-scale strike-slip faulting region, but on the outcrop scale there’s an incredible amount of faulting and folding!

my Palestine reading list (alphabetical by last name)
a working list—feel free to suggest more!

-Lights in Gaza by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, & Michael Merryman Lotze
-The Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky
-The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine by Ben Ehrenreich
-The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
-The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein
-Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha
-The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt
-Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappé
-The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé
-The Unspoken Alliance by Sasha Polakow-Suransky
-The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

notes:
• i think The Question of Palestine is probably the most essential on the list
• i haven’t gotten through all of these so sorry if any turn out to be bad!