Now and then I've posted on the work I've been doing with others on a giant fold structure offshore Palos Verdes (Playa del Rey to offshore Newport Beach). It was finally rejected by Journal of Geophysical Research, after I spent 3 months equivalent to full time over a 9 month period this year making major revisions. While there were some legitimate comments, like my writing style is somewhat dense, we are once again running up against a couple of established opinions, like when we proposed an alternative model to Fault Bend Folds etc and it took 5 years to publish that (I was not lead author). The same fault bend fold model is still being widely used and because of the limitations of the models, in my opinion, faults are being inferred with the wrong dip directions: at Palos Verdes, at San Joaquin Hills. This matters when strong ground motion is modeled using a given earthquake source. It matters to tsunami hazard.

Part of the problem was a graphical model made by a co-author with my input that looks like a cartoon, but is in fact quantitative and incorporating more data that others. I knew this model would make or break the manuscript and, in part, it was a main reason it was rejected. So, now I have to learn a new software so I can take the same model and have a computer program spit out the results so that reviewers will think it is more fancy and will be more reluctant to cr*p on it. I'm getting old and my brain is full and I wonder what I will forget in order to make room for another software...I already have trouble with my phone number.

What's kind of funny or sad is that there were a couple of papers published during 2009 that said one of the horizons that I (with students) interpreted from near Long Beach to offshore San Diego is 10 to 15 times younger than we say. If that were true, the rate of thrust slip would be so high that it would be impossible; probably 10 to 20 mm/yr. So, if I wanted to get a high-impact paper published, I'd just use the newly published stratigraphy and come up with some high slip rate and panic everyone. I of course would not do that; I'm confident that our interpretations and stratigraphic ages are approximately correct.

Chris