Alfvinr

Bathroom Done

2010-02-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

I finally finished the bathroom. I think it looks a bit better... The kitchen is the main project left to do (plus all of the little stuff that is always popping up).

And just for fun here is a picture of the moon I took on Jan 29, 2010.

A quick house update

2009-12-14T18:22:00.000-08:00

I finally finished a couple of rooms. There is still a lot of work to do in the kitchen, and a little work to do in the bathroom.
This is what my bedroom looks like now. The other room is also done.. and is full of boxes.
This is what my front room looks like now. A slight change from what it looked like before.

2009-09-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

Pictures of my house torn up

"master bedroom"

bathroom half tiled

hall

living room

Kitchen with some tile

Kitchen with more tile

Everything covered so I can spray paint the ceiling and walls
( the ceiling was really rough)

Bathroom tile down

2009-09-04T11:03:00.001-07:00

We had an earthquake swarm the last couple of weeks, and somehow I didn't feel a single one. A seismometer was installed near the epicenter of the swarm, and no earthquakes have happened since... http://www.ees.nmt.edu/Geop/recentquakes.html I was going to post some more house pictures but left my camera at home.

New House

2009-08-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

A few quick pictures of the inside of the small house I bought. I had an ugly/cheap peach/salmon colored paint, and linoleum throughout the whole house. I will post some pictures of it torn up when I get a chance.
Bathroom

Hall (2 bed, 1 bath)

Living room

Kitchen/Dinning area

Socorro weather

2008-08-18T20:33:00.001-07:00

We had some crazy weather in Socorro this weekend. Saturday (8/16/08) a storm suddenly popped up over Socorro and dumped lots of rain and small hail for 15 or 20 minutes, then was over.This is a picture of the rain at its worst. Aperently it dumped even worse in the north end of town.
This is a picture of the road by my apartment, it had become a river.
This picture is a bit blury because I took it while driving. This is the NMT golf course, and it is flooded and covered in small hail. The mist from the hail made it look really eerie.
This is the arroyo that I have to cross to get to work. The water had already started dropping when I got there.
Another picture of the arroyo, you can see the high water mark/debries by the arrow.
The is one of the holding ponds for runoff. It ended up completely full, and the road running along the left side was closed because it was flooded so bad (you can see the police cars blocking the road).
This is the road in by my apartment after the water had dropped, along with the new gravel bar (there were lots of these along the road) Some of the rocks were as big as a fist.

These next pictures are from the next day (Sunday 8/17/2008), and these storms were a lot meaner.
This storm had a tornado warning with it, and radar was showing a tornado vortex signature. I had thought it was to far away to see, but when I went outside I could see the storm towering to the north. I glimpsed some low hanging clouds below the storm so I jumped into my truck and drove up the nearest hill for a better view. When I stopped I saw this cloud sticking out of the bottom of the storm. Because the storm was so far away I couldn't tell if the clouds were rotating. If they were it was a funnel cloud.
This is a picture of the same storm, but not zoomed in as much. This storm dropped 3/4" hail to the north, and weather underground radar showed a tornado vortex signature for an hour. Not long after I took this picture the storm started to fall apart.
Another picture of the potential funnel cloud.
A possible wall cloud for a storm that moved in behind the one with the tornado warning. This one was almost scary to watch as it moved in. It looked like it was really trying to get strong rotation going, but could never quite succeed.
This is a the same storm as the previous picture, taken as the storm was moving out of Socorro. It is stitched together form three picture, and doesn't do the storm justice. The right side of the storm was really chaotic. Here is a sped up movie of this storm taken by someone else.
Just another picture of the right side of that storm as the sun was starting to set.

Earthquake update

2007-05-26T20:23:00.000-07:00

Looks like the USGS put it the earthquake at M3.4. NMT calculated it to be a 2.9, but that is probably an underestimate. Lots of fun! Here are a couple of links
http://www.ees.nmt.edu/Geop/recentquakes.html
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2007csam.php

and a picture of an actual seismogram. I was going to stitch several together to show the whole thing, but it didn't turn out well for some reason.

EARTHQUAKE!

2007-05-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

Just had another earthquake. I will post more once I find out. It is probably going to be around M2.5 again, though after looking at the seismogram from the 2.5, this looks bigger, so it could be as big as a M3. Here is the online seismogram of it. Looks like there were a few fore shocks. Once again I heard it coming, though it wasn't as loud as the first one. The main jolt felt stronger this time, there was a strong jolt to my chair.

Big Boom

2007-05-09T15:37:00.000-07:00

I finnaly got around to taking screen shots of the video.

This is the car they blew up. A nice, redish, hail damgaed car. The lines going through the picture are from the mirrors. They made us watch the explosion in a bunker so we wouldn't be hit by flying debree. The shock wave would have hurt our ears if we had been unprotected. As it was it was still really loud.

Note the shock wave above the explosion. Though it is not visible on most of the screen shots, the shock wave was quite visible in the movie. The flying debree was also very obvious.

Another picture of the fire ball.

And finnaly a picture of what is left of the car. It looks like it may be the engine block or something. It is also possible to see how far the engine was throw from where it started initially. It seems like they told us that they put the explosives in the back seat. Due to atmospheric conditions they only used 100 lbs of explose instead of the usual 500 lbs...

Boom

2007-04-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

Better late then never right? I saw a EMRTC demonstration earlier this year (blow stuff up) Here are a couple of pictures from it. They showed as several different sizes of explosions. To bad I wasn't able to get a picture of the explosives before they set them off.

The fist one they showed us was a letter sized sheet of C1 (if i remember right) It was cut in the shape of a letter, and fit inside the envilope like a piece of thick paper. That is a picture of the wood table to letter was sitting on.

As you can see there is a letter sized hole in the table (and it blew out the sandbag) The corn missing is where the guy doing the demonstration cut off the corner to make sure the fuse had a good contact.

This is a picture of the table that had a 11 x 8 sheet of explosive in a manila envelope inside of a briefcase. It did a number on the table

The grand finale was a car bomb. Using 100 lbs of fertilizer and nitrogen, they blew up a little red (probably hail damaged) car. In the upper right of this picture you can see what is left of the car. It was totally destroyed and the remains (probably the engine) were thrown a good 100 feet. It was very impressive. I have a video of it, but need to figure out how to get screen captures or something so i can post the images.

Even more GPS work and some ballons

2006-12-07T14:28:00.000-08:00

I was trying to sleep in the Saterday after thanksgiving. Around 8:00 in the morning I started hearing a roaring/dragging sound. I thought it was my neighbor dragging something around his yard or pulsing a propain torch. It turned out to be closer to the latter. When I finnaly looked out my window I realized it was a hot air ballon going right over my house.

A picture of one of the ballons and one of those parishoots you fly around (can't remember what it is called) It turned out I was still wrong, it wasn't a single ballon, or even two. It turns out there were 40+.
Looking south of my house
Looking north
South again, but looking at a different area.
A couple of shaped ballons, the devil is eclipsing the sun
A better view of the devil (he also has a tail) and a sea creature with fish all over
That was a wierd looking ballon
Someone needs to be carefull with the nail gun. This ballon came right over my house.
Two ballons glowing in the dark. You can see the crowd around the ballons as well. They were lighting them up on the golf course that night.
Two more ballons during the night glow. There were 7 ballons total that night.
We had to walk two miles to get to the last GPS site. That was after driving down arroyos for an hour. This is a picture of sand bars about 15 feet above the stream bed. That must have been some flash flood, espeically since the catchment basin for this arroy isn't that big.
This is the slot the flood whould have gone through. It looks like it can hold a lot of water, and from the sandbars it appears there was so much watter going through that some of the water went over the top of the hill to the right of the picture!
The lined up stones are the ruins of a house from the pueblo indians. In the background you can see the cart we were using to pack in the gps equitment (since the roads washed out)
Some pottery fragments from the same site as the previous picture. We found two sites, and the crew that went out to pick up the gps equitment 4 days latter found another site. The dimand design is aperently popular around 1200 AD. (the site has been dated at 900 -1150 ad)
More peices of pottery. There was another piece with red designs on it but I couldn't find it again to take a picture of it.

Another painted piece of pottery. That is how I found it, sticking up like that. We also came across what looked like an old wagon road. There was what looked like a burial along the road. I also found a piece of a clam along there as well. There are no fossil clams in the area, and this site is in the middle of nowhere.

More GPS field work

2006-11-22T13:59:00.001-08:00

Another moon picture, I took a bunch of these. I am never satisfied, but I thing that is due to the fact that I want the pictures to turn out like looking through a telescope.

If the Jeep was any wider it wouldn't have made it. This was apperently an old wagan trail.

Just around the corner from the last picture

It was windy at the first GPS site we picked up. (yes it really was that windy) We estimated that winds were gusting to at least 40 miles an hour, possibly more. It blew my glasses off my face. That is Dave Love head field geologist for the NM Bureau of geology (If I remeber right his grandrather was the once that discovered Love waves (a type of surface wave produced by and earthquake)

The GPS station we were picking up, and John trying to fill in the field nots without the wind ripping all of the pages out of the notebook

Some Petroglyps that were in the canyon we drove through. The spanish apperently put the crosses on all the rock were they found petroplyps. I havn't had time to see if I can bring out the petroglyps any better.

I don't know if this is from hte spanish or not. It looks like it is fairly old though, and took a lot of work to carve.

This is a picture of the road through Escondida(just north of Socorro). It looks like a snow plow came through the way the mud is piled up along side the road. The mud is from the flash floods this summer, and Escondid was the worst hit by the flooding. The road looks like this through much of the area, sometimes worse when the road crosses large arroyos.

2006-11-04T18:52:00.000-08:00

I had to do some fieldwork for a GPS campain survey. The survey is looking for uplift do to the Socorro magma body. Here are some pictures I took while doing the field work. I would have taken more, but I had to use my camera to take pictures of the GPS deployments since the camera we were supposed to be using for that quit working.

This is an arroyo that we crossed last year to install a seismomter. It was washed out a little after the monsoon season this year.

This is the same crossing from the other side. It is now over 8 feet deep now. There was another arroyo we drove up to get to one of the sites. It was probably 5 feet deep and 20 to 40 feet wide. When we climed out, we noticed that all of the plants in the valley had sand/mud bars behind them. It turns out that during the height of the flood the whole valley was full of water. Unfortunatly I didn't have room to take a picture of that place.

These are some petrogliphs near one of the stations. There are 4 different petrogliphs in that picture.

A close up of one of the faces and the snake in the picture above.

A close up of the other two. A face and some kind of animal

Here is a petrogliph of what looks like a sun. It was a few hundred yards from the others.

Just playing around trying to figure out my camera

Dito (its a branch in front of the moon in case you are wondering)

2006-10-29T10:38:00.000-08:00

I went to San Lorenzo Canyon last night for a Geology Club barbecue. I finally bought a digital camera and I took it with me. Unfortunalty I don't have the memory card for it yet. There is a cool rock fromation on the way to the canyon that I have wanted to get a picture of , and I finnaly got one.

This is the rock formation, it is a very obviouse unconformaty (where the rocks were deposited as flat layers, rotated, eroded, then new layers were depostied on top) If you look at the bottom of the picture you can see where this summers rains cut out the arroyo. The road to the canyon is an arroyo, and the canyon is kinda like a slot canyon.

Here is a zoomed in picture of the rock

This is inside the canyon. There was even a little water still flowing. The water must have been 4 feet deep or more during the hight of the flash floods (from looking at sandbars). In theis picture you can see were the channel has been cut, it is at least three feet deeper then it was last time i was out there. This is a favorate place to hold barbeques and dinners for the Earth Environmental Science Department. This is where they take all the prospective grad students when they come to visit.

The sunset in the canyon, to bad I ran out of space on my massive 16 mb card, it got even better. I can't wait untill my 1 Gb card gets here.

I finnaly scored

2006-09-26T18:01:00.000-07:00

I finnaly scored a goal while playing for the New Mexico Tech club soccer team. We were playing a team from Fort Lewis University in Durango. The score was tied 1 - 1, and I ran onto a through ball and vollied it into the net with me LEFT foot. It ended up being the game winning goal. It was the first time the NMT club soccer team had beat Fort Lewis at home. We beat them for the first time last year here in socorro. This weekend we played the Arizona teams (UorA and ASU) in Arizona, both with over 40,0000 students. We have 1800 students! We lost both games 1-0, and we completely pissed them off. We also had some really good scoring chaces (i missed one of them :( ) I guess they are used to blowing us out. It was funny, we lost to ASU by one goal and they were so mad they wouldn't even shake our hands, and we were all happy because we had even outplayed them at times. I have never seen a winning team so pissed off. Last year it seems like we lost to them 7-0 or 8-0. Now if I could just learn how to dribble and control the ball and head the ball :Þ

2006-07-31T15:31:00.000-07:00

I need to quite thinking about buying a digital camera and just buy one. It would have come in usefull twice now. A couple of months ago the salt ceder trees along the Rio Grande River started on fire, causing the whole sky to light up. It would have made a great picture if I had a digital camera. Now this week there has been a lot of rain, with dry arroyos filling with water, lots of water. I went to one near campus and I could hear boulders crashing off each other and off the road, and the water had dropped several feet by that point. I was able to get a couple of pictures for other people so you can get an idea of what it is like. It dumped again Sunday night, causing even more flooding, but by morning the water levels had dropped again.

This is a picture my friend Jana took on Saterday evening. This is a flood contral dam above Socorro. It is usually a dry sandy area, but after the rain it was full. Nobody can remember this much water here before.
One of Jana's friends took this picture in box canyon (above Socorro) They somehow cought the beginning of the flash flood. You Can see how hard it is raining in this picture as well.

Another feelable earthquake

2006-01-27T12:52:00.000-08:00

There was another feelable earthquake on Dec. 12, at 9:37 pm :) I heard and felt it, but when I looked at the seismic rocords it was so small I thought I was just imagining it. I found out latter that others had felt it. We finnaly got a good location on it. It was a Magnitude 0.93 and occured directly under Socorro at a depth of only 2.1 km. That is wy it was possible to feel it. That has got to be one of the smallest, if not the smallest earthquake ever felt. Compare the trace below to the other trace farther down the page to see the difference in size.

Earthquake - Oct. 29 at 9:00 pm mst

2005-10-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

A couple of links from NMT and the USGS about the earthquake. It was widely felt/heard around Socorro, including by me. :) It was so loud it showed up on the infrasound detector on campus. In fact many people though the earthquake was an exposion at first, since explosions are set off every day by the materials engineering people. The sounds was apperently due to the high frequency waves from the earthquake transmiting into the air. It was only a M 2.4, but the epicenter was so close to socorro (3.5 km) that it was widley felt and hear by most of the town.

This is a picture from the Helicorders at the university. I will try and post a picture of the paper records latter.

This is a picture of the paper records from the earthquake. There are a bunch of smaller earthquakes as well as the "big" one. I counted close to 200 earthquakes on this days paper! The eartquake starts at the red arrow. (this is not the whole paper, just part of it) The long dark lines are trains passing by. I counted almost 200 earthquakes on this paper. Most of which were really small.

Iceland Class

2005-06-30T09:03:00.000-07:00

These are some pictures from a geothermal resources class I took. I was in Iceland from July 3 - July 14, 2005. For a more comprehensive set of pictures from my class see my friends site.

A panorama I took from a volcanic crator in Iceland. For some reason I couldn't upload it as one picture so i had to break in into two pieces. The left side of the bottom picture lines up with the right side of the top picture.

A picture of the sun at midnight

A picture from our trip onto the largest glacier in Europe. The tallest peak in Iceland is in the background

A Humpback Whale - taken from the crows nest

Another picture of the Humpback Whale (first one seen since last summer)

A picture of a water fall in Iceland, there where lots of them.

Three glaciers coming down off the continental ice sheet.

Me standing in the ocean next to an iceberg.

An iceberg filled lake, source of the iceberg in the above picture

Another picture of the icebergs with me (and a seal) in it. You can see the head of the seal to the right of my head.