Another Map… With Many More to Come

Hello and welcome to week 2 of GRAVITY defying research (is this even a real blog or just a place for me to showcase my amazing puns?). As is the case for starting out in most undergraduate research, and I suppose for any new endeavor in life, there’s usually an initial period which focuses on learning and adjustment. These next few weeks, I expect, will be that period for us in which we will hopefully gain a decent grasp on some of the technical skills of this work, as well as the academic knowledge behind it.

As Blakely described in his previous post, we are currently working on becoming familiar with the QGIS software which we'll use for mapping and data visualization/analysis. In our last meeting, we had a kind of QGIS orientation led by Oscar, where we got a chance to play around with the software. We were able to work with some real data collected in Costa Rica by previous groups! Here's an exercise we had to try on our own over the week: making a map of our hometown with some points of interest, as pictured below.

Here's a quick little puzzle. Its quite easy since the labels give it away but see if you can figure out which point is which: one is an ice cream shop, two are parks I frequently run at, and two are places I work - a farm and a restaurant.

Along with the mapping, we’re also going through some sources such as textbooks and notes in order to improve our academic grasp on gravity anomalies and the surrounding science. The gravity chapter in the earth science textbook, it seems, has plenty of physics and physics style approaches/derivations. So it’s a good way of learning interesting new content which isn’t too out of the scope of what I’m used to.

Over the first week I've found one perk of working remotely is the flexibility. At the current stage of our project, I can usually go about my daily routine in terms of chores, work, running, and other recreation (which includes but is not limited to the brainstorming of GREAT puns) while using my remaining free time to work through the textbook chapter or further familiarize myself with QGIS. That being said, it's time to go study some gravity! More to come next week, stay tuned.