UTALL in the wild

October is here, which means it's time for annual reviews, which means it's time to not do annual reviews, which means it's time for...a blog update! When I was a kid we used to get Christmas newsletter (?) updates in which various dads I vaguely knew wrote about their kids' progress in marching band. By which I think I mean, I'm about to channel 90's dad vibes.

Here's the whole crew at the NWLDW conference this summer. DRILL folks outdid themselves as hosts and a great time was had by all.

Diana even won an award for her poster on ventifacts. But like...of course she did.

Speaking of ventifacts, we had a field trip to the Mojave in which Albuquerque looked like this

and then my tent looked like this

and Diana & Julia looked like this

Deserts gonna desert, man. But we got a bunch of samples for our new NSF project, including some samples digesting at UVM CCF this very minute...

And here's Julia talking about those same ventifacts at GSA last month. Peep the little 3D-printed ventifacts on the poster edges. She's a structure-from-motion wizard.

Over spring break, Karissa and I also did some field work in the Clear Lake Volcanic Field with USGS collaborator Jessica Ball. Monster maars!

This summer, Cindy Lou, Karissa and I made a trip out to the Beartooths for some moraine sampling.

After watching my drilling efforts, Cindy Lou told me to "get out of the way and watch how a real geologist does it."

While we were in the Beartooths, a hydrothermal explosion went off in nearby Yellowstone, which happens to be one of Karissa's study areas with USGS collaborator Lauren Harrison.

Also, Karissa gets awards in college-wide competitions for this stuff. See--she booked out a planetarium to tell people about hydrothermal explosions.

Meanwhile, Ayush and Jeffrey met up with UCLA collaborators from Seulgi Moon's group, including my good friend Marina Argueta, to search out some good deformed units.

Ayush has been busy unravelling the mysteries of southern California...

...and giving really phenomenal talks (like GSA here) that wrestle with the complexities of geochronology mixed with SoCal tectonics.

Now back to my annual review...Bye!