AGU 2009 blogging #2 — deltas and fans

I got off BART in San Francisco around 8:30 this morning, got a coffee, picked up my badge and headed right to the poster hall. Instead of diving immediately into the posters I had to find a relatively quiet corner to work on some finishing touches for my own talk. I spent about an hour getting it just how I wanted it and then spent a couple hours looking at the posters in the Deltas and Fans session. I ended up socializing with people I hadn’t seen in a while more than actually studying the posters … but, hey, that’s what conferences are all about. I caught up with friends and peers who are in both industry and in academia — and we all lamented 2009 for being a tough year in terms of convincing those who control $$$ to release some for research.

I then went and caught a couple of talks in a late morning session about computational modeling of sedimentary landscapes/seascapes. The two talks I saw were okay, but not great.

After that, lunch (pizza and beer) with a good friend of many years who I don’t get to see all that often.

I went to the entire early afternoon oral session on Deltas and Fans — the companion session to the posters in the morning. Pretty much all the talks were very good — pretty heavy on the experimental side, which isn’t really my expertise, but I always learn something and get ideas about what kinds of features to measure in natural systems and interesting patterns to keep an eye out for.

I headed back to poster hall to check out a particular poster about some modeling of hyperpycnal flows (i.e., river floods so chock full of sediment that they plunge under the water body they are entering into and create a sediment gravity flow). Very cool stuff.

Right before I headed home I uploaded my talk for tomorrow morning. I’m pretty happy with it, gave a sneak-preview to a friend and he liked it a lot. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

Great day!!