Conference is over, time to relax

Right now I am in southern Chile sitting in a hotel lobby decompressing after running a week-long field conference. Man am I exhausted. I along with two colleagues have been planning for this thing for over a year … I can’t believe it’s over. I am very excited to not have to plan anymore!

It was a success — nearly everybody went out of their way to tell us they got a lot out of it. Nobody got hurt and there were only a few very minor glitches behind the scenes.

It was a pretty small conference (~30 attendees) focused on deep-marine sedimentary deposits. I went to a field conference last year that had 3 days of talks and then 2 days of field trips. It felt a bit disconnected to me — so we decided to have talks in the morning and then go out in the field in the afternoon. It was a bit of an experiment but I think it worked. We organized it such that the talks in the morning were generally within the theme of the rocks we looked at in the afternoon. For example, on the day we were to look at possible submarine channel levee deposits, we had a few talks from attendees about similar deposits from around the world.

I’ll be down here for another 5 days to do a bit of field work with my co-worker and our colleague and his students who are starting field projects down here. I’m looking forward to not being the pied piper leading 30 people across a mountainside and worrying about people turning an ankle or something … oh yeah, and explaining the geology clearly as well. The next 5 days I can relax and get my head into collecting some data.

Looks like I’ve missed a lot in the geoblogosphere … maybe I’ll have a chance to catch up soon.

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