Catarina Dinis Cavaleiro

First of all I would like to thank Glomar/MARUM for the financial support to participate in the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco held from the 15th to 19 th of December 2014.

The AGU meeting is, most likely, the largest Earth and Space science meeting in the world. This year, the AGU meeting happened from the 15th to the 19th of December and counted with more than 24.000 participants.
The Moscone center, located in the heart of San Francisco, was filled with a continuous flow of people, in and out of both its West and South buildings. Sessions and talks are happening simultaneously. So one must not be too ambitious in attending all the interesting talks or sessions! Poster sessions are also simultaneous with the oral presentations and several social and educational events, as well as meetings and workshops. Mercifully, many of the keynote talks and some of the sessions are available online. Thus, even if you have missed that talk you really wanted to see, it is possibly available online afterwards.

My poster presentation took place on the last day of the conference, Friday 19th December, belonging to the “Productivity Proxies: New Developments and Records” Session. During my poster presentation I had the opportunity of thoroughly discuss some of my PhD results and gain some new perspectives and ideas on my ongoing and future work. Being such a great conference it was also a good opportunity to gather some of the most experienced researchers and ask for a meeting to personally discuss your doubts and research. Thus I had a work meeting with Prof. Heather Stoll, Dr. Fátima Abrantes and Dr. Antje Voelker, to discuss some issues/open questions of my PhD work. I would also like to thank Albert Gerdes for inviting me to participate in the Career Workshop: “Research in Germany Career Café”, organized by DFG – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - as a GLOMAR/MARUM PhD student in Bremen, held on Tuesday afternoon. It was good fun and interesting to meet and help some undergraduate and PhD students in answering their questions on how is it to do research and live in Germany and how they can apply to a PhD position here (for more information see: http://www.research-in-germany.org).

Despite being so big, this conference offers an amazing environment for students and researchers to easily engage in scientific discussions both at the Moscone center lecture rooms, as well as outside, during lunch time. With 24.000 attendees, wherever you go in the city during these days, the most likely is that the person next to you is a scientist!

Participating in this AGU was an unforgettable experience. It is very challenging but what surprised me and engage me the most was the diversity and depth of specificity of interesting subjects, such as the relationship between climate and human evolution, the development of equipment that allows us to investigate life in other galaxies, or what are the best ways to communicate our science to kindergarten or high-schools kids. It has therefore allowed me to increase my scientific network, to learn about latest achievements in my own research field paleoclimate and paleoceanography but gain new insights on different Earth sciences fields.

Finally, I also participated in the IODP workshop entitled “IODP Primer: An introduction to the Ocean Drilling Programs”, on Sunday, 14th of December. Topics like accessing IODP archives and data, how to participate in expeditions or how are these expeditions selected were presented. It was very helpful to better know IODP, what are its aims and how it works.