Clastic Detritus

I did not make it to the conference on Thursday, but I was there yesterday (Friday) from 8:00 am until 5:30 (with a nice long lunch in there).

There were several posters I wanted to check out yesterday morning, but I went early to catch a few of the talks in the “climate sensitivity” session. Jim Hansen was supposed to be first, but they had a technical issue so they bumped James Annan up. That name seemed familiar to me and, lo and behold, it is the same James of James’ Empty Blog. The topic is not in my field so I cannot comment on the nitty-gritty, but James delivered a great talk about our assumptions that are built into calculating various probabilities of climate scenarios. Jim Hansen spoke next and discussed the paleoclimate record a little deeper than people usually do (the Cenozoic record) within the context of evaluating sensitivity.  He had to rush at the end of the talk to finish in time…this was a pattern I saw many times at this meeting that I will rant about below.

I then checked out some posters about river bifurcation and avulsion. Specifically was Doug Jerolmack‘s poster discussing some observations and modeling of how avulsion leads to bifurcation patterns and the time scales in which this happens. Doug is a very enthusiastic scientist and does a great job of explaining his work. If you ever have a chance to check out a talk/poster by him, do it.

I checked out several posters in the hydrology/sediment transport session. As a sedimentary geologist, I’m mostly concerned with long-term preservation (stratigraphy) but always learn something from those looking at the mechanics of sediment transport.

I then went to check out a talk by a former student at my institution that is now at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He did his work on the habitability of Europa. He is essentially a combination of a physicist, astrobiologist, planetary geologist, and engineer. His talk discussed some aspects of calculating the thickness of the ice shell on Europa that were way over my head. The point of the talk was to try and calculate the thickness based on physics alone (especially the tidal interactions with Jupiter) and not so much by looking at the ice surface.

Later in the afternoon, the last slot of the whole conference, I went to a “depositional landforms” session. The aim was to bring together observation of modern and ancient systems with modeling studies. It was a good session, I enjoyed it. It’s tough to be on Friday afternoon like that, but there was a decent-sized audience. Sessions that aim to integrate disciplines are a double-edged sword in some senses. I love the concept, I am very much a fan of integration…but, sometimes I feel like the session needs a wrap-up of some kind. Either a really good talk at the end that actually brings things together, or a discussion panel. I’m not sure what the answer is. Again, I enjoyed the session and don’t mean to sound nit-picky, but I’m always trying to think of ways to make it better.

On to one of my biggest pet peeves. Several times during AGU this week I was annoyed at talks that ran out of time and had to rush through about 4-5 slides in the last 30 seconds. I understand that 13-15 minutes is a short time to give a talk, but everyone knows what the length is and should be prepared. I get way more out of a talk that gives a nice “take-home” message at the end. A good punctuation mark, so to speak. The talks that started off great and were clearly not practiced for timing, trailed off with a lot of details and essentially had to blow off the conclusions (and no time for questions). The whole point of a giving a talk, to me, is to give the audience something to take away. What is the point of the study? Did some unexpected questions arise from doing it? Is there a problem with our conceptual understanding at some fundamental level? Did it quantitatively address some issue that previously wasn’t? And so on, and so on. The bottom line: PRACTICE YOUR TALKS! Maybe I’m being nit-picky, but I’ve seen this pattern in a lot of conferences. It can make a talk that starts out fantastic end with a whimper.

Overall, I had a great time at AGU this year. It is a hugemongous conference and can be a little overwhelming. I don’t even attempt to catch all the “big” events and typically stick to sessions in my field. Those of you who go to conferences know how tiring it can be. The location is, of course, one of the best parts. Not only because it is a 15-minute street car ride for me, but San Francisco is also one of the greatest cities in the world. We had a great weather this week too…sometimes it can be dreary and gloomy this time of year, but it was sunny and crisp all week.

I have a good idea for a session next year…I might work on getting that down on paper now.

About.com has a nice Friday wrap-up as well here.

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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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If you’re expecting a detailed report of exciting new geoscience research reported at AGU today, you should go somewhere else. I didn’t arrive at the meeting until lunchtime and then spent most of the afternoon browsing posters rather lazily. Luckily, I’m just a guy with a blog and not a member of the press.

I did go to a few talks in the Geomorphology of Mars session, which was pretty cool. One thing I realized watching these talks is how fundamental the geology they are doing is. I saw a talk about using HiRISE images to do some basic structural geology. They were able to generate a DEM and then make traverses and measure bedding attitudes on very well-exposed sedimentary rocks. Pretty cool. The interpretations of the geologic history are very speculative without any ground-truthing, but it’s a start.  Another talk in this session discussed what they termed “rhythmic” bedding and then speculated about highly ordered cyclical forcings (e.g., Milankovitch cycles). This is a pet peeve of mine … cyclical bedding can be generated from non-cyclical forcings … there is no need to jump to conclusions about a highly ordered forcing. Especially, on Mars where we won’t be able to ground-truth for some time. But, to the presenter’s credit, he did say this interpretation was only a possibility and is impossible to confirm with the data available at this point.

I saw some nice posters this afternoon, but have to admit that I was relatively relaxed today and did not dive head first into any of the studies. I did, however, check out a poster about a thermochronology study that was pretty cool…that’s a hot field, I hear.

I’m rampin’ up. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to be checking out most of the talks in the session my talk is in. And, in the afternoon, there are tons of posters for that same session. So, hopefully, I’ll have a bunch of notes and thoughts to share tomorrow night.

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