Lea Vecchiarelli
Research with Caribbean vibes!!
Last Monday I met with my Costa Rica mentor (Ivonne) around 10 am, we did some training on the program SEISAN, she taught me how to be able to read seismographs more precisely and navigate through the program. I spent a couple of hours trying to locate p-wave arrivals for different seismic events recorded by several seismic stations. After locating the p-wave arrivals for all the different events, I will have to locate s-waves which are very important for finding the right location of epicenters. Later on, all of us and mentors gathered and headed to the International Relations Office at the University of Costa Rica to sign a few documents.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Steve and I spend a lot of time traveling alongside our research mentor and two technicians from UCR (Gato & Jean Paul). We visited three seismic stations. The first seismic station was in a town called Veraguas in the middle of a rainforest. We serviced the seismic station and changed old SD cards so more seismic information can be recorded in the upcoming months. We visited the other two stations on Wednesday. Visiting the two stations, in towns La Estrella and Cerro Uatsi, was a bit challenging for us since it required a lot of driving on rocky and steep roads through bananas plantations and gigantic bamboo trees. All the locations were close to the Caribbean Coast of CR so we witnessed amazing views of the Caribbean beach. The stations were also pretty far from one another, we had to start our work days early (around 7am).

On Thursday morning we left the Caribbean Coast around 8:30am, drove for about 5 hours and got to San Jose around 1:30pm.

