The End

Hawaii? Nope. I got to breathe tropical air for about thirty minutes before hopping right back on a plane. Turns out I'm needed, in the Swiss Alps, of all places. So here I am, in the same place I've been for the past four days- in that weird in-between neither-here-nor-there world of airplanes.
I guess someone saw this blog, because now a new magazine wants me to write a piece on plate tectonics, focusing on the Alps. So, although I'd love to be in Hawaii right now, at least something good came out of this.

Switzerland! Who knew. This is better than Hawaii. I just got back from hiking in the mountains and need to start working on my article soon, but I thought I'd do one last little paragraph on plate tectonics before I leave this blog for good because I ACTUALLY HAVE A DECENT JOB!
So the Alps are part of what's called a convergent collision boundary. It's similar to a convergent subduction boundary except that instead of one plate moving under the other one, the plates just collide, as you can probably tell from the name. When the plates collide, they push up the rocks in between them and form mountain ranges along the plate boundaries, like this one:

So this is probably the last time I'll write on this blog. Even though I didn't get to go to Hawaii, I'd say it was worth it. Who knows, maybe I'll pop up in a magazine at some point in the near future.

Until then, thanks for reading!

Uuuuuuuugh/San Andreas Fault Line

You'd think after all this everything would finally work out, right? Apparently not. It turns out I got on the wrong plane, which I only realized after we had reached 30,000 feet. Now I'm sitting in the airport in Santa Maria, California. Not exactly where I planned on being, but there is a bright side- I'm just a car ride away from the San Andreas fault line, a transform boundary that formed a huge crack in the earth:

Transform boundaries occur when two plates slide in opposite directions, creating a rift in the earth like the one above. Transform boundaries don't have dramatic effects like earthquakes and volcanos, but one interesting fact is that because of the San Andreas boundary, in around ten million years, LA will have slowly moved right next to San Francisco! 

Now I'm on yet another plane to go to LA in order to transfer to Hawaii. It's about 10:00 here, and I'm in for a long night, so I'm going to try to fall asleep. Try being the keyword there. I'll update later, when I'll hopefully be drinking pina coladas by the pool.