AGU blogging #2: Wednesday wrap-up

Again, the title of this post is a little misleading. This post is not a wrap-up of what a happened at AGU on Wednesday as a whole, but what happened for me at AGU on Wednesday.

I gave a talk in a morning session called From Mountains to Ocean Deep: Tracking Material Fluxes. Basically, two sessions had to be combined into one session…so the first few talks focused on fluid and elemental fluxes, and the second part focused on sediment fluxes. It worked okay…but was a little to disjointed for my liking. When people are giving 12-13 minute talks, they need to get to the point, which requires some jargon and “skipping” the fundamentals. Specialists appreciate this, but others get lost quickly. This is just the nature of the beast. If I’m in a session about a certain topic, I expect everybody to be on the same page. So, when disciplines are brought together to try and bridge a gap, sometimes it doesn’t quite work out.

Anyway…my talk ended up being the last one before the lunch break (and end of the session). I received great feedback about it and had plenty of follow-up questions. I was very happy with the talk…I felt very comfortable with the timing and the “take-home” message.

The poster session component of this same session was in the afternoon. I was a co-author for a poster and ended up hanging out by the posters all afternoon. I spent some time talking to a woman doing some work on clinoforms offshore of the Fly River in the Gulf of Papua…fantastic data, fascinating stuff. Another poster summarized some physics-based models of turbidity currents flowing down Monterey Canyon. They were able to constrain some of their parameters from real measurements made in recent years from monitoring systems in the canyon. This is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak…we are only beginning to find out about the sedimentary processes that take place in these settings.

After that, a small group of us went and got some sushi in The Mission and then a few beers. A great day at AGU!!

I’m not sure what’s going on tomorrow…I need to look at the program.

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