Announcement: Pre-College Course for High School Students

Happy rainy day, hydrologists! The grey clouds and puddles are a welcome change from the crazy snow we got up here in Massachusetts last week. I don't know what's up with that polar vortex, but I'm so ready for it to simmer down.

Anyway, I just want to share some info on a really exciting project I'm doing this summer!

I've noticed that kids really don't have access to understanding the hydrologic cycle and where their water comes from. Plus, I had no clue as a high schooler that I would be as interested in groundwater issues as I am now. So I'm teaching this class through UMass' summer program for high school students to help them learn about the water cycle and explore their interest in hydrology. Please share far and wide, and click here for more information!

Home Office Zen

 

My desk at home! With my computer screen on my "Arabic Word of the Day" e-mail!

Hey geo-nerds! I've gotten a few questions about my office set up and, since it's Spring Cleaning season and I'm all about revitalizing spaces, I figured that I would talk about how I find my zen in a home office environment. I admit, it can definitely be hard to find focus in a place where there are often so many extractions, but with a little attention to detail you can create a zen-rich work place at home.

As you can see from the photo above, my desk layout is pretty simple and minimalist. I got my desk online on Amazon. My chair is from Target, but I couldn't find my original chair so I'd recommend this one from Stein Mart, and my lamp is from IKEA. I always like to start filling a space with white or neutral colors and then building from there with accents, like picture frames, wall color (my current wall is a mellow yellow!), carpet, and curtains. These are more budget-friendly options for my fellow grad school enthusiasts out there, but high-end style like this is available everywhere.

I had a Chinese-German friend in college who diligently adhered to feng shui, so learning from her, I actually found that following a few basic feng shui rules really helps create focus:

1.) Place your desk so that it is in sight of the rooms doorway. You should be able to move your head 90° or less to see the door. If you need to position the desk so that your back faces the door, hang a decorative mirror so that you can see the door from your desk!
2.) Add a plant or two!
3.) Keep your desk free of clutter. I have a mobile portfolio organizer that I just stick in the closet when I'm not working.
4.) Add pictures or imagery that inspires you or reminds you of the importance of your work. For me, it's photos of my research site in Chile.
5.) Make sure to decorate with a balance of both light and dark colors!

Good luck with your office! And feel free to share your personal tips for working at home in the comments below.

On Failure

Happy March, guys! I don’t know how many of you have managed to take a vacation lately, but I took Spring Break as a chance to recharge after a very hectic couple of weeks. I’ll talk about how to get great travel deals for a grad school budget soon, but in the mean time I’ll touch upon an important point that I think is great for every grad student, scientist in a cut-throat culture, or basically any person who takes on a challenging career. The big take-home message: Failure is not only inevitable, but it’s necessary. 

 

A shot during one of my sailing trips out in the Boston Harbor. Sailing has taught me a lot about navigating around and beyond mistakes.

I know this is a common message in a lot of popular graduation speeches (e.g. J.K. Rowling and Oprah Winfrey) but it’s important. We can’t celebrate success if we don’t embrace failure. You can argue that failure is an integral part of the human experience, and is just as important as success in any career and/or life journey. I’m talking about this now because I just received a “no” when I was really hoping for a “yes.” I am definitely bummed, but it’s nice to remind myself of how those icky “no’s” can be useful. Really, it’s all about perspective.

So, when we get a dreaded “no,” what are some guidelines we can use to find the hidden benefits? For simplicity, I’ll focus on career-defined failure, but I think a lot of the tenants in these guidelines can serve for any facet of life. Here are my thoughts on dealing with failure:

1.)   Don’t let the “no” define you. Perhaps you didn’t get the result that you wanted, even after so much effort, but that doesn’t mean that either you or your work is subpar. This is just one “no” out of a series of “no’s” and “yeses” that you’ll receive in your life. Just one “no” is not enough to decide the value of your effort, so don’t let it affect how hard you try in the future.

2.)   Statistics are always in your favor. No matter how much you fail, every time you try gets you one step closer to a success. It’s like playing the lotto, except your chances are better. Do a quick exercise: in one category of trying (e.g. applying to graduate school), how many tries ended up in success? Twenty-five percent? Ten percent? Five percent? If the answer is yes, then congratulations! Your odds are a lot higher than the lotto! And all it takes is four, or ten, or twenty times to get what you want! I love playing the lotto, but I love the chances of success even more, so don’t let one number in your statistics bring you down.

3.)   Embrace the negativity. Understandably, if you’ve worked really hard on something, you’re absolutely going to feel bad about a “no” after so much effort. Not everyone agrees with me on this, but I personally think that it’s great to embrace that upset because those feelings of disappointment are valid. That being said, it’s important to be gracious to yourself and move on after acknowledging those feelings. For me, moving on could mean crying it out, going for a walk, or grabbing a drink with friends or family.

4.)   Talk about it. Don’t be ashamed of any failure you receive in your career. Be open to discussing the difficult moments because it will help you process and connect with peers and mentors.

I hope this was a helpful read! Feel free to share strategies in the comment section below!

Dire Confusion

Happy beginning of February! I’m busy drafting my prospectus and diving into a fresh, new semester! I’m also checking out Valentine’s Day nail art on Pinterest when I need to take a break from research and/or the news.

Via Instagram

Speaking of the news, my original plans for this blog were to focus on my two main passions, my research and Arabic stuff, which seemed inherently apolitical before the elections. But, as I noted in a previous blog post on my reaction to the election, it’s been really hard to separate the political from the personal.

  

Attending marches have felt healing in the wake of the inauguration and the ban. Calling my congressmen also provides a kind of cathartic relief in knowing that I’m doing my civic duty. Donating what I can to the non-profits that I support also gives me hope that we as a nation can focus on nurturing our communities to weather this storm.

At the same time, despite all this positive energy, I think it’s fine to admit that we’re all a little scared. Okay, let’s be honest, we’re all really scared!

One way in which I’m scared is the fact that this ban on certain muslim-majority countries hasn’t vanished through our legal system yet. I’m hoping that, with our collective support, this unruly executive order will disappear in due course. But, if it doesn’t, it will have very dire consequences on a lot of American families, many of whom are immigrants who are just trying to do what hundreds of thousands of immigrants have tried to do before them.

Some of those immigrants happen to be S’s family. They’re from Syria. If this ban remains, we have to figure out where they can relocate to outside of the United States. After having to leave Syria in the middle of a civil war, the thought of finding a new home is traumatizing. We hope that it won’t come to that, but we just don’t know. There is a lot of confusion about what the ban means and how far it can go, especially since it seems to be changing all the time and different judges are temporarily blocking the ban. Needless to say, however tiring, we’re following the news very carefully.

Besides the very personal way in which this impacts my life, I worry about what this ban means for the values of the United States. The constitution was designed to support a group of people with different backgrounds. It’s true that American history has repeatedly betrayed many groups within its nation, and I hope that this ban does not become a piece of that long list of injustice. If the ban remains, I don’t think that this country’s government can claim any pretense of equal opportunity.

So what’s your take on the ban? Feel free to drop me a line via this post’s comment section, e-mail, or your preferred social media channel. Also, please remember to practice self-care (my favorite new buzz word) because we need to prepare for a very long four years!

Update on 02/05/17: In a very dramatic couple of days, the a judge in Seattle repealed the ban, and when the administration appealed the decision, the court of appeals denied the request. It certainly seems like there's hope that the ban will soon be a very brief moment in history, but I think it's important to stay alert and pay attention to all the ways in which people coming from the affected countries could still face discrimination.

Remote Sensing & Lagoons: How to measure inundation with aerial images

Hey geo-loves! Hope everyone was able to enjoy the weekend despite the political events that recently transpired. Going to the Women’s March in Boston last week was a really inspiring way to see people come together.

One of my photos from Instagram of the protest last weekend.

So, I’d like to talk a little bit more about my lagoons (they feel like my lagoons because I look at them so much!) and what I’m doing with them. Right now, I’m developing remote sensing for my lagoons in Salar de Atacama in Chile. What is remote sensing? It’s when you take satellite data (which in my case are images) and manipulate that data to get information.

In my case, I’ve been taking images of my lagoons and outlining the extent of their surface area in ArcGIS. By outlining the lagoons, I’m able to measure how the surface water expands and retreats through time. I am specifically focusing on a time period after a large precipitation event that occurred in March of 2015 to see how the lagoons responded to precipitation-driven recharge. Here’s a “before and after” shot of the lagoons on March 17, 2015 versus May 20, 2015.

Can you see the difference?

There’s a pretty noticeable difference, isn’t there? To measure the surface area of the lagoons, I draw polygons around the surface water extent and then use ArcGIS to measure their surface area.

I’m really excited for some new maps with even better resolution that will come out on the Landsat Imagery website later in February. I’m also excited to take this remote sensing a step further and measure the coloration of the pixels in each image to get even more accurate surface area measurements.

So what do we see in these lagoons’ responses to the March 2015 storm? First, we see that not all lagoons react uniformly. Those differences in response may indicate variations in topography, in discharge, or in recharge based on each locale’s stratigraphy. Second, we notice that the most recent lagoon changes may be a part of an ongoing decline in the over all extent of lagoons throughout the salar.

Why are these variations in lagoon surface area occurring? That’s for me to explore further in my thesis, and I’ll make sure to keep you guys updated every step of the way. In the mean time, feel free to comment on this post or e-mail me with questions or thoughts! Have a good weekend!

DJ Khaled (a.k.a. Abu Asahd, a.k.a. Khaled Mohammad Khaled)

Hey guys! I hope everyone is excited for the weekend as I am! I’m going to Boston to hang out with S and his family, and I can’t wait!

In the mean time, I figured I would share a bit of information on one of my favorite R&B / Rap artists this year: DJ Khaled.

More than a few of my friends and family are a bit puzzled by my interest in DJ Khaled, so I want to give you a peek into all the cool things about DJ Khaled that make him a fascinating figure:

1.)  He is Palestinian-American. And his actual name is Khaled Khaled, which means that his first name is Khaled and his last name is also Khaled. Perhaps his parents have a sense of humor, or maybe his grandfather’s name is Khaled (because in Arab culture it’s common for the first-born son to be named after the grandfather).

2.)  His perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is unclear. While DJ Khaled certainly seems sympathetic towards Palestinians in interviews, he is certainly not outspoken about the conflict or any politics in general. This is remarkable, to me at least, because I’ve never met a Palestinian who doesn’t have a very strong opinion on the conflict and is not shy to share it. Earlier this year, he participated in an event with Sabra Hummus (which has ties to funding the Israeli army via the Strauss Group) and got a lot of criticism for it from his pro-Palestinian fans, but I’m not sure if he ever responded to that criticism.

3.)  He named his son Asahd, which means “lion” in Arabic. Anyone who knows DJ Khaled knows that the lion is his spirit animal, so his naming choice clearly shows a connection both to his heritage and his love for lions. In Arab culture, parents are called the father or mother of their first-born son (or daughter, if they have no sons), which means that I bet in some circles he’s now known as Abu Asahd. He is really adorable with his son on Snapchat, by the way.

4.)  He Snapchat-ed the birth of his son. This phenomenon is mind-blowing in itself because it shows how, in this moment in time, social media has given the world a window into strangers’ most intimate moments. I’m amazed that his fiancée didn’t take the phone and beat him over the head with it. Anyway, he did update his Snapchat feed regularly, and I did follow it. And I find that how people react to these important moments of life illuminate their values. For example, watching DJ Khaled’s Snapchat, I learned that he’s Muslim because he paused his music in the middle of the birth when it was time to play the call to prayer. This was cool way to see how versatile DJ Khaled is in navigating between two cultures, by partying to his own music while also taking time to connect to his faith during the birth of his son.

5.)  His new book got to the New York Times’ bestsellerlist. That in itself is amazing, because the book’s description on Amazon is vague at best. But, reading the reviews, it seems like a lot of people and especially young men have found a lot of inspiration from his words. DJ Khaled does exude positive energy, so I’m sure that positivity shines through his book as well. I will definitely read his book whenever I have time (after my program in four years?) but anyone else who reads it, please let me know what you think.

Anyway, it’s about time for me to get back to remote sensing of my lagoons’ surface area. Hope you liked the post! Let me know what you think about DJ Khaled and stay tuned for a new post on my research coming up soon!

Update on 1/30/17: DJ Khaled actually posted a series of Snapchat videos yesterday, which consisted of a montage of protests through space and time, including images of Palestinian protesters and America's Civil Rights Movement. It turns out the montage comes from a music video made for Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come." I think this is a political statement, indeed! And its beautiful imagery connect all the human and civil rights, illustrating the importance of showing up and fighting for all rights. To be honest, it's hard for most people these days in the United States to be apolitical if they care, so I'm glad DJ Khaled made a stand. And I wonder if we'll see more artistic political statements from him in the future!

¿Qué pasó con las Lagunas?

Hope you all had a lovely holiday season so far! I’m in Kentucky visiting family, and I’ve been really enjoying just relaxing. Anyway, since I’ve finished a section of my prospectus, I figured I would share a bit more on my research focus for all of you who are interested.

Photo taken by my advisor of a transitional pool looking southeast towards the Andes.

Lately, I’ve been really fascinated with the lagoons that are located in Salar de Atacama (SdA). Here’s a quick refresher: SdA is a basin in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, which is the driest nonpolar desert in the world and is therefore a great place to study groundwater dynamics in arid regions. SdA is also the home of the densest naturally occurring brine, which is water that has a lot of dissolved halite (i.e. salt) and other compounds that make it denser than fresh water. My general interest is defining the factors (like evaporation, dissolution, and changes in the hydraulic gradient) that drive groundwater flow in brine-rich and arid environments which, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, are unique from mechanisms seen more temperate climates. 

Eastern view of Lagunas Miscanti and Miniques, looking towards the east at the Andes. Photo courtesy of my advisor!

I think that the lagoons are the key to studying those factors further. Why? Because the lagoons are located along the boundaries of SdA’s surrounding mountains and the basin’s halite nucleus, which is basically a giant chunk of salt that has accumulated in the valley floor of the basin from tens of thousands of years of evaporation. The lagoons are also located along the transition zone between the relatively fresh groundwater and the brine. These lagoons are only slightly briny, whereas the groundwater under the halite nucleus is incredibly briny (in fact, it’s likely the heaviest brine naturally found anywhere in the world). This means that the lagoons are likely being recharged from relatively fresh water coming from the uphill Altiplano region in the Andes. So, these lagoons and the area around them are a great place to study the processes by which freshwater turns into such heavy brine.

Flamingos depend on the algae and the crustaceans that live in the lagoons. Photo courtesy of my advisor.

So how can I study the lagoons and the areas around the lagoons to figure out how this brine develops? One good way is to delineate the extent of the brine and to figure out where the groundwater becomes so concentrated with dissolved sodium and lithium. A lot of work has already defined the lateral extent of brine, but the vertical extent of the brine is still poorly defined. There are also a lot of insightful techniques for tracing groundwater flow by studying changes in temperature, isotope ratios, and dissolved lithium and sodium. I’ll make sure to explain each tracer in more detail later on.

So, based on what we know, it looks like the lagoons are responsible for generating some of the densest brines on earth. Why? The extremely high evaporation rates extract water out of the lagoons and leave behind the dissolved compounds like sodium and lithium to create the denser brine, which eventually sinks down and into the rest of the brine that underlies the halite nucleus. The lagoons are likely the only place for this process to occur because the surface of the halite nucleus acts like a barrier against evaporation with almost no porosity and a very high albedo.

Here’s a little peak into my progress! Let me know if you have any questions, and Happy New Year!