Back to San Francisco

Back to San Francisco, both for us and the AGU Fall meeting. The meeting was bigger than ever with more than 25000 participants, celebrating the centennial of AGU-100 years. This time, we only stayed for the meeting and unfortunately had no time for sightseeing, just a little Christmas shopping.
The dogs were left with colleagues from the University of Gothenburg. We invited Lina Rasmusson and Michelle Nygren to stay in Reykjavík for one week, looking after the dogs and paying their airfares. They experienced one of the worst storms in Iceland in decades. This was the first time ever that colour code ‘red’ was used for weather warning in Iceland. Luckily, the capital area was not as badly affected as the northern part of Iceland.
In San Francisco, the weather was much friendlier, mainly overcast and rain. The sun appeared the day we left, giving us ‘Icelanders’ a last chance to catch up on sunrays and D vitamins before returning to the darkness in Iceland. Erik took this sunny picture from our hotel room on 3rd street:

Gabrielle presented a gigantic poster (printed at AGU) about the search for ikaite outside the Alnö Island in Central Sweden, using the research vessel ‘Electra’.

This is one of the Stockholm University projects from when she was working there as a post doc/researcher. There was a surprising large number of people visiting the poster, both known and unknown scientists, mainly interested in news about the mineral ikaite. Here is a photo of Gabrielle together with a known scientist, colleague Guðmundur Guðfinnsson from the University of Iceland, explaining to him the advantages of having a marine research vessel at your disposal:

Erik gave a talk about the Icelandic Grímsvötn volcano, which was well received and well attended although the talk was at noon on Friday. You could see that a lot of people had already left the conference. We heard several good and interesting talks. The best one was probably by Mike Poland from the USGS talking about the advantages of including satellite data in volcano monitoring. He is such an excellent presenter, explaining about science in a way so everyone can follow.
We saw many excellent posters, too. The “hangar” at Moscone South hosted up to 3500 posters per day. Can it get any bigger?!

We visited the poster from Pete La Femina, Erik’s colleague from Penn State University, who has taken the step into Virtual Reality (VR) teaching. Pete explained the advantages of VR geological excursions. Erik tried the virtual goggles and was taken to an excellent locality of mid Ordovician limestone at the Nittany highway just east of State College in Pennsylvania.