The largest conference in the world

Last week I went to the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. AGU is the largest gathering of geoscientists in the world--every year, attendance is record-breakingly large, and this year we broke the record yet again with over 21,000 attendees.

Riding on the escalator is the best time to spot people below.

 Chance meetings with people I knew years ago are common. It's like going to a music festival, except without all the instruments and jamming. Everyone has a nametag. Lots of faces look familiar, and you can't figure out why until you've already passed them. The best interactions are when you pass someone on the escalator going in the opposite direction, and you only have time for a sedate, demure "parade wave", like the Queen of England.

Some people dress up. We are scientists, so we're not quite sure how to dress up. The classic look for AGU is:

a suit (because you know you're supposed to wear a suit)

backpack (with the straps slightly crushing the shoulders of the suit)

white sneakers

plaid shirt

baseball cap

poster tube

AGU is held in the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. The size of the building is too staggeringly large to really comprehend. It's like trying to come to terms with the vastness of geologic time, which, come to think of it, we have all had to do at some point or another. The number of concurrent events going on at any one time is also really too staggering to comprehend. The poster hall alone is so large that you can't see the other side. It is arranged in alphabetical order; when I have to hike from PP ("Paleoclimate") all the way to C ("Cryosphere"), I have to pack a poncho and a snack.

The poster hall is, in fact, so big that pigeons fly around inside. Sometimes they land and walk amongst the posters.

We all stay in hotel rooms as close to the Moscone Center as possible. There's nothing like sharing a hotel room with 3 or 4 of your closest colleagues, people you usually share office and work space with every day, to really get to know each other's habits. This year we stayed in a cinema-themed hotel that had a strange interior window in the bathroom that merely connected us, in an auditory and olfactory way, with the bathrooms of other hotel rooms directly above and below us.

I'm not sure how to interpret this.

You see a lot of weird stuff at AGU. Well, I see a lot of weird stuff. These guys were from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, and had their mascot with them, Camilla Corona.

A rare candid photo of Camilla Corona.

So I went to talks and listened. I went to poster presentations and asked questions. I went to lunch and dinner with people and talked about science until my ears almost fell off. Going to a conference like AGU is one of the most stimulating things I can do as a scientist--I spend all year sitting alone in my office, reading, getting ready to talk to other people about science. It's pretty exhilarating.

I did spend some time down at the Embarcadero, on the waterfront in San Francisco. Here's an obligatory safety shot:

Even at a professional conference, safety first!