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.Twitter Post (140 Characters)
4870 talks and 8489 posters in 5 days, EGU 2015 was an amazing experience, thanks for the help @challengersoc.Blog – Post
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.
Latest News
Potential Availability of NERC Ship Time During the 25/26 Programme Year
The NERC Marine Facilities Programme for 2025/2026 for the RRS Discovery and the RRS James Cook has been published on the Marine Facilities Planning website.
The RRS Discovery programme currently contains a 79 day alongside slot between the 2nd of November 2025 and the 19th of January 2026, which is available for science delivery if funded science projects can make use of this time. Due to the location of the vessel, the ship is most likely to be able to deliver fieldwork in the North and East Atlantic regions. Some support for science capability within the National Marine Equipment Pool is potentially available, although there is no capacity for use of autonomous vehicles or remotely operated vehicles. Any fieldwork within Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) will need the appropriate diplomatic clearance submitted to coastal states at least 6 months in advance, and to NMF with sufficient lead time for processing via the FCDO.
If interested in making use of this ship time, please contact NERC Marine Planning (marineplanning@nerc.ukri.org) ASAP to start discussions.
THE MARINE FACILITIES ADVISORY BOARD – CAN YOU HELP?
The Marine Facilities Advisory Board advises the National Oceanography Centre on marine facilities and services, including the Natural Environment Research Council’s National Marine Equipment Pool (NMEP), the British Oceanographic Data Centre and the British Ocean Sediment Core Research Facility.
NOC Association AGM 2025
NOC Association (NOCA) AGM 2025
The 14th AGM of the NOC Association will be held on Thursday 15th and Friday 16th May 2025. This free, on-line event will take place on Zoom, across two consecutive mornings, each starting at 10:00 and ending at 12:30. Although discussion topics are being finalised, we will focus on national capability (NC) science, ships, and autonomous vehicles, and how the community can engage. There will be an update on AtlantiS and on the new marine science scoping group. All are warmly welcome to join. To participate, please complete your registration here. For enquiries: Jackie Pearson, Secretary to NOCA: jfpea@noc.ac.uk