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Newsletter
Fall 2009
by Susan Delap Heath
Click here for previous news items.
TECHtonics Alumni Newsletter
Geothermal Drilling Project Begins on M-Mountain
October 21, 2009 -- NMT began drilling a geothermal slim hole as part of plans to heat the campus using geothermal energy on October 21. Mark Person is the PI. Updates of drilling progress can be found here -- now including VIDEO! More details are in this NMT article.and this New York Times article.
Alaska Volcano Research
October 21, 2009 -- For a taste of what volcano research in Alaska is like, read this article on the Alaska Report website -- Geophysics in Alaska -- an interesting story about Guy Tytgat, who works at IRIS PASSCAL at NMT.
Hendrickx Hosts Scintillometry Workshop
October 12, 2009 -- Jan Hendrickx hosted a scintillometry workshop at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge October 12-15, 2009. A parallel Inter-comparison Experiment ran from October 9-24. Thirty participants from 6 countries attended. Sponsors were CUAHSI and the U.S. Army Research Office. Website.
Special Day for Earthquake Awareness
October 7, 2009 -- October 11-17, 2009, is National Earth Science Week. New Mexico Tech took it a step farther and proclaimed October 15 as Earthquake Awareness Day. Rick Aster, along with Nelia Dunbar, Dave Love, Mike Timmons, and Stacy Timmons of the Bureau, prepared radio spots about their specialites which were aired during Earth Science Week. NMT article. An article about New Mexico's seismicity with comments about the August 2009 swarm are here.
EES Undergrad is "Standout Techie"
October 1, 2009 -- Geology Undergrad Niranjan Khalsa is featured on NMT's homepage as a "Standout Techie."
Pie Town Earthquake
September 23, 2009 -- There was a 2.5 earthquake close to Pie Town around 7 am on September 23rd. Details are here.
NMT Member of WInSAR
September 14, 2009 -- New Mexico Tech is now a member of the Western North America InSAR (WInSAR) Consortium of universities and research laboratories to facilitate collaboration in, and advancement of, Earth science research using radar remote sensing. For more information, please visit http://winsar.unavco.org or talk with our Institutional Representative, Mark Murray.
Boston on Polluted Caves
September 8, 2009 -- Penny Boston is quoted in an article on the Environmental Health Sciences website about how polluted caves can endanger water supplies and wildlife.
Blamey Receives Honors from Aberdeen
September 4, 2009 -- One of our department's faculty, Nigel Blamey, has been awarded an honorary Research Fellow position at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. The University of Aberdeen was established in 1595, and the department of Geology and Petroleum Geology has an excellent reputation world wide. Nigel flew to Aberdeen in July to discuss the on-going fluid inclusion research with their department head, and to date, three projects are active that include space exploration, metamorphic fluids, and Snowball Earth.
MSEC Wall Project
September 4, 2009 -- The EES department is looking into livening up the south wall outside of MSEC, with the blessing and input of other departments housed in the building. The current idea is to create a design using mosaic tiles. Please email your ideas to sdelap@nmt.edu or bring copies of your drawings to the EES office in MSEC 208. More details with photos and diagrams are here.
Lemitar Earthquake Swarm
September 4, 2009 -- The Socorro area has been experiencing a lot of seismic activity since August 19th. The swarm was preceded by a 2.3 quake a few miles NE of Escondida on the east side of the Rio Grande. Within a few days, numerous small events punctuated by a few larger quakes (1.9-2.6) have been occurring a few miles NE of Lemitar, also east of the Rio Grande. The latest details are here. Several articles have been written on this including the following: NMT, ABQ Journal, El Defensor Chieftain. Rick Aster was interviewed by KRQE TV on September 8th. See the video here.
IRIS and NMT Receives Funding For Greenland Ice Sheet Monitoring
August 28, 2009 -- IRIS was awarded $1.9M in funding from the NSF to develop a seismic monitoring network on the Greenland Ice Sheet. PhD Candidate in Geophysics Kent Anderson is a co-director of the project. NMT's IRIS PASSCAL Center (PI is Rick Aster) will be working on the engineering and technical side of the project. More details are here. NMT article.
Curtis Wins Speleological Award
August 25, 2009 --Aaron Curtis, an incoming geochemistry graduate student who will be working with Philip Kyle on the ice caves on Erebus volcano in Antarctica, recently won the James G. Mitchell award from the National Speleological Foundation. NMT article.
Koski Wins Speleological Award
August 25, 2009 -- Katrina Koski, PhD Candidate in Hydrology, won the Ralph Stone Award from the National Speleological Society. Each year, the NSS awards two Ralph W. Stone Graduate Fellowships for cave-related thesis research. NSS members currently pursuing graduate studies anywhere in the world are eligible to apply. Past recipients are Diana Northup (UNM who collaborates with Penny Boston on the SLIME team), and George Veni -- head of NCKRI.
Katrina Koski at entrance to Vaca Ha, Tulum MX (photo by Tanja Pietraß)
Some details from Katrina's proposal: Karst aquifers supply about 25% of the world’s population with water, and nearly all potable water to certain regions (e.g., 90% of Florida’s drinking water). Unique to karst aquifers is the presence of conduits, which are analogous to surface streams. Phreatic conduits are connected water-saturated tubes (below the water table) from one centimeter to tens of meters in diameter that contain most of the flow (all of it turbulent) but less than five percent of the storage of the aquifer. The water-saturated rock surrounding the conduits contains little of the aquifer flow, but comprises most of the aquifer volume and hence most of the storage. While the residence time of water in the conduit is days to weeks, the residence time of water in the matrix is decades to centuries. Thus, in chemistry and behavior, the conduit water is like surface stream-water whereas the matrix-water is ground-water. This is a unique physical system where there is a large, distinct volume of water similar to surface water below the water table (sometimes a hundred meters or more below).
John Wilson and I are studying the exchange of water between the conduit (underwater cave) and matrix (rock) in a karst aquifer. Because I am a certified cave diver (and rumor is John is going to become one!), we are able to take observations and place instruments inside the conduit and the matrix adjacent to the conduit. One variable we have to quantize to fully understand the conduit-matrix coupling is how and when the sediment moves through the conduit. My Ralph Stone Award proposal detailed a simple experiment to release tagged, artificial sediment in a karst conduit and track its movement.
EES Geophysics/IRIS PASSCAL Workshop
August 24, 2009 -- The EES Geophysics Group and the IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center jointly put on an Antelope seismic database workshop on August 24-25, 2009. The main objective was to provide the opportunity to learn and develop a better understanding of event detection, data processing tools, and to develop software interfaces with Python and Matlab. More details are here.
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