Rain!
This morning it rained in the desert. Sometimes the desert rain is a soft mist and other times it's a torrential downpour; today, we had both. It rained overnight in Barstow and the scent of the moistened desert filled the air. As we drove to the field, the rain fluctuated between light mist and downpour. As we got to our first site, MOJH, the rain was still pretty substantial and the datalogger has bluetooth connectivity issues. Thankfully, everything appeared fine, so we did our best to get the data copied and the cable protection installed as quickly as possible. Our other two sites, MOJI and MOJJ, presented little problem and the rain quickly died down once we reached the first site. The hiking between sites was a bit rough: we were constantly going over little hills and taking advantage of the few flat washes we could find.
The other team had some bigger station issues, however. One station's solar panels weren't working, but they were able to fix them. Another station had a chewed through GPS cable. They were able to replace it, but now we need to think through a longer term solution to keep our GPS cables safe from desert critters. We have some ideas and will be implementing a fix tomorrow at as many stations as we can.
All told, we had 14 out of 19 stations in perfect condition. The handful of problems we have, we've fixed what we can, but we'll use this experience to improve our seismometer boxes to avoid these problems in the future. It is always painful to lose data, but we'll be able to use the data of these failure modes to prevent future data loss.
Once all 19 stations were serviced, the four of us gathered in Ludlow for Dairy Queen and then went to the lava tube at Pisgah Crater. It was more than a little beautiful and a great chance to play around with some rocks. It's only a 15 minute stop off the road, so I'd definitely recommend it to folks traveling through this part of the world looking to go see some fresh volcanic rocks.
The other team had some bigger station issues, however. One station's solar panels weren't working, but they were able to fix them. Another station had a chewed through GPS cable. They were able to replace it, but now we need to think through a longer term solution to keep our GPS cables safe from desert critters. We have some ideas and will be implementing a fix tomorrow at as many stations as we can.
All told, we had 14 out of 19 stations in perfect condition. The handful of problems we have, we've fixed what we can, but we'll use this experience to improve our seismometer boxes to avoid these problems in the future. It is always painful to lose data, but we'll be able to use the data of these failure modes to prevent future data loss.
Once all 19 stations were serviced, the four of us gathered in Ludlow for Dairy Queen and then went to the lava tube at Pisgah Crater. It was more than a little beautiful and a great chance to play around with some rocks. It's only a 15 minute stop off the road, so I'd definitely recommend it to folks traveling through this part of the world looking to go see some fresh volcanic rocks.
Selfie of the group. Photo: Simone Puel
A poor tortoise's shell.
The grad students at Pisgah Crater
Simone climbing out of the lava tube
The grad students in the lava tube. Left to right: Brandon, Kelly, Simone.
Our shadows over the crater.
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