European Geosciences Unions General Assembly 2015- Vienna, Austria

Craig Smeaton

University of St-Andrews

 

Profile

I am a 2nd year PhD student working with Dr William Austin and Dr Althea Davies on the long term storage of particulate carbon in Scottish coastal waters. The work focuses on quantifying the carbon held within the sediment of Scottish sea lochs (fjords) and determining the long term drivers of carbon transfer  from the terrestrial to the marine environment.

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4870 talks and 8489 posters in 5 days, EGU 2015 was an amazing experience, thanks for the help @challengersoc.

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I would like to thank the Challenger Society for a travel award enabling me to attend EGU 2015 in Vienna. The conference took place between the 12th and 17th of April, the conference itself is on a different scale to anything else I have previously experienced with 11837 attendees from 108 countries.  In truth at first the experience in intimating but that quickly wears off once you attend your first session.

With 577 different sessions there was massive choice of talks on offer; on the whole I stuck to the biogeoscinece, ocean and sedimentology sessions. I also attended climate and planetary science sessions these session are not related to my work but the talks were extremely interesting especially the session on the Rosetta mission.

My talk “A Carbon Inventory for a Scottish Sea Loch” took place on Tuesday morning; it was part of the Biogeosciences of the Coastal and Shelf Seas session.  The talk went down well and I got some useful input from the audience.

During the week I went to a number of academic/social events such as the IODP Town Hall Meeting and the Geological Society of London reception. Here I met friends and made contacts that I hope will be useful in my future research. 

Overall, the conference was a great experience the vast amount of different science present was inspiring.  Thank you to the Challenger Society for helping to make it happen.