What's New?

What's New?

Some recent publications and awards involving me and students:

Chelsea Scott (ASU) and I are super excited that our high-resolution topography of the Southern San Andreas Fault from Painted Cave to Bombay Beach (40 km of fault length) is now publicly available on OpenTopography. Vicki Lee (VT) and Brigham Whitney (recent UVU grad) deserve big kudos for their help with the fieldwork on this project, and of course OpenTopography deserves a big shout-out for being such a fantastic resource. This contribution is by far the largest dataset on OpenTopography that was generated using sUAS (small drones) and structure-from-motion methods. Here is the link to the data release https://opentopography.org/news/new-sfm-data-over-southern-san-andreas-fault-ca and here is a link to directly access the data, https://doi.org/10.5069/G94M92RG

I received a ~$5000 award from the UVU College of Science Scholarly Activities Committee to support research into displacements of Lake Bonneville Shorelines by tectonic processes. This work will support class projects by students in my Geospatial Field Methods class.

Our work involving students in our summer field camp course on the Topliff Fault (Utah) was featured in an article in the Deseret News: https://www.heraldextra.com/news/community/higher-education/uvu-column-uvu-department-shaking-things-up-in-earthquake-studies/article_77f3a132-9388-59cb-bb9f-efb71267ddf2.html

And our work on the central San Andreas Fault, which included students from Geospatial Field Methods, was featured in another article in the Deseret News: https://www.heraldextra.com/news/community/uvu-column-prestigious-journal-publishes-work-by-uvu-faculty/article_93598cba-26c3-5798-891b-7584b13d1472.html

Our research documenting the distribution of creep at Dry Lake Valley on the creeping section of the San Andreas Fault has been published. This is an exciting piece of work to get out, as it represents several years of work documenting surface fracturing and quantitatively estimating creep magnitude recorded in the fractures, and using SfM photogrammetry to make a very high quality point cloud of the land surface that Dr. Chelsea Scott (Arizona State University) differenced against LiDAR collected 10 years previously to quantify the distribution of deformation along and across the fault.

Scott, C., Bunds, M.P., Shirzaei, M., Toke, N., 2020, Creep along the Central San Andreas Fault from Surface Fractures, Topographic Differencing, and InSAR Imagery, Journal of Geophysical Research, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JB019762.

Tim Stahl (U. of Canterbury, N.Z.) and Nathan Niemi's (U. of Michigan) work on the tectonics of the Drum Mountains Fault Zone (Sevier Desert, Utah) is in print; I was lucky enough to get to help with this interesting project and I'm very pleased that two UVU undergraduates (Andreini & Wells) also made significant contributions:

Stahl, T.A., Niemi, N.A., Delano, J., Wolfe, F.D., Bunds, M.P., Howell, A., 2021, Diffuse Tectonic Deformation in The Drum Mountains Fault Zone, Utah, USA: Testing the Utility of Legacy Aerial Photograph-Derived Topography, Frontiers in Earth Science 8:600729. doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2020.600729

Stahl, T., Niemi, N., Bunds, M.P., Andreini, J., Wells, J., 2019, Paleoseismic patterns of Quaternary tectonic and magmatic surface deformation in the eastern Basin and Range, USA, Geosphere, https://doi.org/10.1130/GES02156.1.

The first of what should be two publications on surface deformation along the Lost River Fault (Idaho) from the 1983 M6.9 Borah Peak earthquake was published in 2019. This project involved using early DJI Phantom 2 drones custom-equipped with Sony cameras to map ~16km of the fault scarp. It was a big project that would be a lot easier today with our eBee fixed-wing drone and its on-board differential GNSS. This work was led by Chris DuRoss of the USGS.

DuRoss, C.B., Bunds, M.P., Gold, R.D., Briggs, R.W., Reitman, N.G., Personius, S.F., Toke, N.A., 2019, Variable normal-fault rupture behavior, northern Lost River fault zone, Idaho, USA, Geosphere, v 15, https://doi.org/10.1130/GES02096.1.

We've published several high resolution topography datasets on OpenTopography recently:

Bunds, M.P., DuRoss, C.B., Gold, R.D., Reitman, N.G., Toke, N.A., Briggs, R.W., Ungerman, B., and Matheson, E. (2020). Lost River Fault at Doublespring Pass Rd, Idaho 2015. Utah Valley University (UVU). Distributed by OpenTopography. https://doi.org/10.5069/G9TH8JWV

Bunds, M.P., Scott, C., Toké, N.A., Saldivar, J., Woolstenhulme, L., Phillips, J., Keck, M., Smith, S., and Ranney, M., 2020, High Resolution Topography of the Central San Andreas Fault at Dry Lake Valley, California, USA, distributed by OpenTopography. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5069/G91N7Z92

Bunds, M.P., Andreini, J., Wells, J., and Stahl, T.A., 2019, High Resolution Topography of a Portion of the House Range Fault and Pleistocene Lake Bonneville Shorelines, Sevier Desert, Utah, USA, distributed by OpenTopography. https://doi.org/10.5069/G9348HH6.

Bunds, M.P., DuRoss, C.B., Gold, R.D., Reitman, N.G., Toke, N.A., Briggs, R.W., Personius, S.F., Johnson, K., Lajoie, L., Ungermann, B., Matheson, E., Andreini, J., Larsen, K., 2019, High Resolution Topography of the Northern 16 km of the M6.9 1983 Borah Peak Earthquake Surface Rupture on the Lost River Fault Zone, Idaho, USA, distributed by OpenTopography, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5069/G9222RWR.