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Thomas Lorscheid
Report of GLOMAR PhD student Thomas Lorscheid about his participation in the AGU 2015 Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California, USA from 14 – 18 December 2015
The Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) is an annual conference bringing together researchers from all geoscientific sciences. It is the largest meeting for Earth and Space sciences in the world and welcomes regularly around 24000 participants (http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2015/). As every year, it took place in the last week before Christmas (14.-18. December) in the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
The conference lasted for five days and included around 1700 sessions. Most sessions were divided in two parts for oral and poster presentations. The oral part was usually two hour long and consisted of up to eight 15-minute talks. The posters were displayed for the full day, although the sessions were scheduled for either the morning or the afternoon, when the authors should also be present. Due to the large amount of sessions, the parts were not necessarily at the same day. For such a large conference, you need to organize yourself already in advance and check when and where the most interesting talks and posters are. In addition to the printed and the online program, there was a smartphone-app, which should help finding your way through the meeting. For sea level related science there was a session about “Sea Levels and Ice Sheets during Past Warm Periods: Looking to the Past to Understand the Future”. The oral part of this session was also recorded and is now available on the AGU website (http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2015/virtual-options/). This allows also people who could not make it to the conference in participating to some selected sessions. I got the possibility to present my recent work on sea-level highstands in Mallorca during the poster part of this session. It was a very valuable experience to present and defend my results to an international audience from my field of research, as well as to scientists outside that area.
Besides the “normal” oral and poster sessions, the AGU Fall Meeting offers many other possibilities in participating. One example is the exhibition hall. In this area, many commercial, governmental and educational institutions and companies present their businesses. This is very helpful in getting contact to possible future employers, learning about new equipment or just wonder around for some “science-free” time. As part of a DFG funded booth (http://www.research-in-germany.org/en.html), MARUM and other research institutes in Germany were also presented this year. Linked to this initiative, there was also a social event at the Goethe Institute, including a planetary lecture about the Climate and Tectonics in the Andes followed by a reception with food and drinks.
On the Saturday after the Fall Meeting ended, I attended another smaller meeting called the “Gilbert Club”. This get-together of geomorphologists is held since 1984, when some scientists decided to meet after AGU for a much more informal meeting. In the first years, it was held in the private house of one of the founders, but since it is growing bigger every year, it is held at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. During this meeting, three invited speakers held a 1.5 hours lecture separated by larger breaks. In the afternoon, everyone who wanted could give a 2-minutes-2-slides-presentation (“as the spirit drives them”). The intention of these pop-up talks was to present recent advances in a detailed study area, job advertisements, new methods or whatever someone wanted to present to this audience. The day ended then with some beer and pizza and more time to chat and connect to other researchers.
For giving me the possibility to attend this meeting, I would like to thank the University of Bremen, the German Excellence Initiative and ZMT for the financial support.
The conference lasted for five days and included around 1700 sessions. Most sessions were divided in two parts for oral and poster presentations. The oral part was usually two hour long and consisted of up to eight 15-minute talks. The posters were displayed for the full day, although the sessions were scheduled for either the morning or the afternoon, when the authors should also be present. Due to the large amount of sessions, the parts were not necessarily at the same day. For such a large conference, you need to organize yourself already in advance and check when and where the most interesting talks and posters are. In addition to the printed and the online program, there was a smartphone-app, which should help finding your way through the meeting. For sea level related science there was a session about “Sea Levels and Ice Sheets during Past Warm Periods: Looking to the Past to Understand the Future”. The oral part of this session was also recorded and is now available on the AGU website (http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2015/virtual-options/). This allows also people who could not make it to the conference in participating to some selected sessions. I got the possibility to present my recent work on sea-level highstands in Mallorca during the poster part of this session. It was a very valuable experience to present and defend my results to an international audience from my field of research, as well as to scientists outside that area.
Besides the “normal” oral and poster sessions, the AGU Fall Meeting offers many other possibilities in participating. One example is the exhibition hall. In this area, many commercial, governmental and educational institutions and companies present their businesses. This is very helpful in getting contact to possible future employers, learning about new equipment or just wonder around for some “science-free” time. As part of a DFG funded booth (http://www.research-in-germany.org/en.html), MARUM and other research institutes in Germany were also presented this year. Linked to this initiative, there was also a social event at the Goethe Institute, including a planetary lecture about the Climate and Tectonics in the Andes followed by a reception with food and drinks.
On the Saturday after the Fall Meeting ended, I attended another smaller meeting called the “Gilbert Club”. This get-together of geomorphologists is held since 1984, when some scientists decided to meet after AGU for a much more informal meeting. In the first years, it was held in the private house of one of the founders, but since it is growing bigger every year, it is held at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. During this meeting, three invited speakers held a 1.5 hours lecture separated by larger breaks. In the afternoon, everyone who wanted could give a 2-minutes-2-slides-presentation (“as the spirit drives them”). The intention of these pop-up talks was to present recent advances in a detailed study area, job advertisements, new methods or whatever someone wanted to present to this audience. The day ended then with some beer and pizza and more time to chat and connect to other researchers.
For giving me the possibility to attend this meeting, I would like to thank the University of Bremen, the German Excellence Initiative and ZMT for the financial support.
Presenting my poster about sea-level highstands around Mallorca during the AGU Fall Meeting
Half of the large poster hall during the meeting
View across the Bay Area from the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley