It has been so long since I made the last blog post that this one warrants a quick introduction.

Hello, I am Meghomita Das. I recently graduated with a doctorate degree in earthquake geology from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University. The whole process of writing a thesis, getting it reviewed, defending it and then finally submitting it explains my absence from here (kind of). But now that the whole process is over, I will try to be more active here (no promises though).

The last post that I wrote here talked about the process of dating minerals, specifically zircon, and how I used that mineral to understand the depositional ages of the rocks at Angel Island. Well, the good news is that now you can read about what I did with that age data and new discoveries in our recently published article in GSA Bulletin (yay! My first first-author paper!). Unfortunately, the paper does come with a paywall. However, if you would like to read the whole paper (fair warning, it is long!), you can access it via the link here.

While I worked on that paper, I was also tinkering away with my fieldwork data to create the newly updated geological map of Angel Island. This process took a while since we were also trying to make some interpretations about how the rocks were related to each other below the surface and what that can tell us about the different deformation events that eventually formed the island and brought it in its current configuration. We are also working with the California Parks System to create a handy-dandy, accessible hiker’s guide that introduces the different rocks and their histories of Angel Island. More to come on this!

And finally, the last part of my doctoral thesis focussed on slow earthquakes. This was the main motivating question that shaped my entire thesis. And Angel Island definitely provided us with some gems on that front. Currently, we are in the process of confirming some of our data interpretation before we finally send it off to the dreamland destination of the journal peer-reviewing process.

I also got to share some of my research at the European Geosciences Union, held annually in Vienna, Austria and met some cool new European rock scientists and science policy enthusiasts like me. I would also happily accept new reasons to travel across the “pond” and visit the seat of the former Austro-Hungarian empire for free any day. All the research and presentation and more research finally translated into my thesis and my eventual defense of that thesis. While I wrote my thesis, I also made the decision to move back to India and take a temporary break/pause from all rock related business. But as they say, you can take the human out of the rock but you can’t take the rock out of the human (don’t fact check me on this, please!).

As I was closing my academic chapter in Montreal, I went on some travels: to San Francisco to see my island, to Peru for my love for potatoes and llamas, and to Mexico for my love for history, earthquakes and obviously tacos. More importantly, I got the opportunity to be on board RV Atlantis on a research expedition to Cascadia Subduction Zone, off the coast of Oregon. It was a full circle moment to check something off my bucket-list but to also witness the active deformation between two tectonic plates that was also one of the first locations where slow earthquakes were ever documented! I will be sharing my first sea adventure in a separate blog post and also share my thoughts about what it feels like to close such a dramatic chapter of one’s life and move back home. All in due time!

I hope all this justifies my absence from blogging for the past two years (yikes!). But I wrote so much in these last two years that I didn’t get the time or the drive to write for me. We are soon going to change that. Expect new stories from rocks to sea-faring oceanographic adventures to the foods I had during my travels. A whole smorgasbord of stories awaits!