Happy New Year

I have actually managed no to write anything in 2008, even though I have had plenty of things to write about.
- Celebrated Christmas 2007 together with the whole family
- Finished writhing my master thesis
- Past the final oral exam (January 30th 2008)
- Was unemployed, applied for only one job and got it
- Went to the Ph.D. defence of a friend
- Celebrated the 60 years birthday of the uncle of Nicklas
- and started at my first real job as a Wind&Site Engineer at Suzlon Wind Energy A/S
- been to Turkey (on a site visit in June - with the job)
- been in London with Nicklas
- 14th August I was to the part A defence of Nicklas' PhD (that is the exam for the first half of the PhD)
- went on a kite-surfing course
- been to a wedding on Bornholm
- been to Greece (on a site visit)
- participated in a WAsP Engineering course at Risø DTU and in Suzlons Wind&Site workshop in Århus
- celebrated Nicklas' 25 years birthday together with the family
... and I have celebrated Christmas and New Year again.
This should be all the most important things that has happened since last time I wrote on my block. Every thing listed deserve a more thoughtfully contribution to this blog, but since it has taken me this long to publish it I will leave as it is for now and just say that 2008 have been a very active year.

Fieldwork near Faxe

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to go to Faxe, in southeast Zealand (Sjælland), to help out with some land seismics. It was really nice to be outside again – to shut down the computer to be outside in the beautiful colours of the autumn. Well is helps when the weather is really nice, as it was.
The project was a collaboration between the University of Copenhagen and the University of Aarhus. The idea was to see the subsurface structures of the chalk and to find coral reefs, just at the edge of Faxe limestone quarry. The main question was: "Why do we find coral reefs here?". A total of about 7 km seismic profile will help answering this question, and the results should be presented at Geomuseum Faxe in a couple of years.The funny white truck in the picture is the seismic vibrator, it sends out a vibration (like a big loudspeaker) that is reflected in subsurface layers (like an echo), the reflection is picked up by the geophones (kind of really sensitive microphones) in the tail behind the vibrator. The method works the same way as the scanning of pregnant women.
It was hard work. In 4 days we worked 52 hours, but well since we had nothing else to do in Faxe, it was OK. The work was to drive the seismic vibrator and to take care that the "tail" was in as straight a line as possible behind the vibrator. It's really easy when the road is straight, but demands a lot of force when the road curves, it's not easy to pull the 6 tons vibrator.

Earthquake and snow

June 28 at 15.25 hrs it sounded like some helicopters were closing in on the institute from the north. Then came the shaking. And it was gone.

It was an earthquake, with the magnitude of 5.7 according to USGS's home-page for earthquakes (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/) near Illapel. I was happy that the epicenter wasn't near Valparaiso, even though I have always said that I would like to experience an earthquake I'm satisfied with the small ones of magnitude around 4. Actually, on the Mercali scale this earthquake corresponded to a 4 near Valparaiso - quite enough for me.

Monday 2nd of July was a holiday here in Chile, in honor of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Actually friday was the actual holiday, but the day off were moved to monday. The saints were celebrated all weekend. Sunday I went to Caleta de Membrillo, just by the institute, with my friends mother to see the procession and launch of Saint Peter, the saints of the fishermen. The day off on monday meant that Juan Diaz had the opportunity to show me Cajon de Maipo as he talked about already when he was in Århus in april. It is a really beautiful place and if you are a bit interested in geology I am sure the you will find it very interesting. I think it was especially beautiful with all the snow.

This wasn't the only snow I was going to meet. Monday morning on 9th July I had my flight home. I was going from Santiago via Buenos Aires and Paris to Copenhagen. But in Buanos Aires we were surprised by snow. Yes SNOW in Buenos Aires - first time since 1918. Since snow is not a every winter happening, the airport was not equipped to move snow. Therefore the captain of the plane postponed the flight until the next day, and I got to see some of the snow of Buenos Aires and to spend the night at Sheraton Hotel. It was quite exiting to experience snow in Buenos Aires, even though this was my first time in the city ... . But next time I'll hopefully not be traveling on my own – it's quite boring to be in a fancy hotel by yourself.

Landing in Santiago

Sunday morning I arrived in Chile. The last hour of the flight to Santiago was really beautiful; the sun was rising over the clods and over the mountains – the cordillera. I was really surprised to see how snowy it was, but well it is winter in Chile. I was talking to the woman beside me (Chilean living in Sweden) about all the clods covering Santiago and the smog, we didn’t realize that we were landing before we were actually on the ground – it was a really soft landing. After the hot June we have had so far in Denmark it was freezing cold going out of the airport in Santiago.
I spend the first day in Santiago with my friend Titi and her family in law. Monday morning we went to Valparaíso with the professor from the project of my thesis.
I’m going to spend almost all the time here in Chile trying to figure out what I can see on my data, because it’s not usual to have seismic reflections from the water column. But fortunately I’m going to spend some time with my godson and friends here in Chile as well.

Between Bornholm and Chile

During the Easter holidays my boyfriend, Nicklas, and I took the liberty to spend a hole week on the danish island Bornholm. Nicklas is born on Bornholm and his parents still live there.
This easter his mother was going to celebrate her 50's birthday. It turned out to be a big party with the hole family gathered, and quite some preparation ... we were going to stay 11 people living in their house for three days.
The party was great, great food – something else than normal "student food" and of course a lot of dancing.

After Easter and after two presentations in the last course I'm taking on the university "Climate through time", I got my plane tickets to Chile. I'm going for 3 weeks in June, to work on my thesis. The oceanographers in Chile know a lot more about "their" ocean than we
here in Denmark. It's going to be a hard week, because I've got a lot to do in these three weeks. But I'm really looking forward to go back to Chile especially to see my friends and my godson.

And now for the TeXing

Last Friday I finished the first part of my master thesis. I finished the first part of the processing of the seismic data. So now it's on with the writing ... and I'm going to write LaTeX - on my new black MacBook. I've finally installed MacTeX, and learned more or less how to use it. In the end I think (and hope) I'll be glad I spent some time getting to know LaTeX instead of writing in for example Word.

Together with marine scientists

Last week I went to the 'Danish Marine Scientist Meeting' in Odense. I presented a scientific poster with the title "Seismic reflections from boundaries between watermases offshore Chile", this is a part of my master thesis at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Aarhus. At the meeting there were mainly biologists, and as I don't know anything about plankton it was hard to stay concentrated. The most interesting part for me was the modeling session, mainly presented by scientists from DMI (Danish Meteorological Institute) - it might be something I'm going to work with in the future.