Rose here –
Last December I got a chance to do two things I have never done before: Visit Washington D.C. and attend the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting. The AGU fall meeting is one of the biggest geology conferences and is held every year in December. This year they broke records with 26,000+ attendees and 28,000+ abstracts submitted!
My advisor was working on a project which required surveying attendees of the meeting and he was able to pay for me to come as well to help out with that. While I had to spend much of my time there at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Data Help Desk in the exhibit hall, I was able to get away and attend some talks and poster sessions. The project I was helping with was asking scientists who came for help at the Help Desk about their experiences, so we can figure out how to make the Help Desk more relevant and helpful for scientists at future meetings.
I flew in a whole day early so I could explore around D.C., because I knew once the conference started there would be so much going on it would be hard to get away. It was quite cold out so I bundled up in my jacket, hat, and scarf and headed out to see what I could find. I headed toward the National Mall, excited to finally visit the Smithsonian and all the memorials. I walked all the way to the far end of the mall first so I could see the various memorials. I visited the World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. memorials. As a geologist, my favorite was the WWII memorial because of the variety of rocks used in cool ways. I also learned that besides the regular Vietnam War memorial wall, there is a memorial to the women who served the country and made great contributions during that time.
Next I visited the National Museum of Natural History. I had seen it in movies, but I was excited to see all the exhibits in person. This being AGU week, the most packed section was the rock and mineral exhibit. There was a line to even get in, and once in the excitement in the room was quite noticeable. It was so fun to see everyone excitedly discussing the different minerals, where they came from, and why they looked the way they did. These are the things we do for fun when you get a bunch of geologists together!
At the conference, while I did spend most of my time working in the exhibit hall, I had picked a few sessions of science talks to attend. The cool thing about conferences like these is that there are many simultaneous sessions in multiple fields of geology, so I could go see talks on anything I want. I often hop around to talks in fields other than what I work on, but since I had limited time to see talks this time I picked a few planetary science sessions to go see, and a few in areas that are important to me, like promoting equity and inclusion and dealing with sexual harassment in the geosciences. One of my favorite sessions was a lunchtime special session on the last day. AGU held a session celebrating the start of their 100th year, where they had speakers from many of their 25 sections give talks on how our scientific understanding has changed in the last 100 years in their field.
One of the coolest things I got to do was on the last day, right before we left D.C. My advisor knows someone who works at the Library of Congress (LOC) with the map collection, so we got to go and get a behind the scenes tour at the LOC. I loved seeing all the old and unusual maps they have there. The room where they store the maps is as long as 3 football fields! As a geologist it was especially exciting to see their collection of notes and maps from Marie Tharp, who used data from instruments on research ships to produce the first scientific map of the seafloor. This map was important because it showed us where the seafloor was spreading and gave us more evidence for plate tectonics.
I am so glad I was able to go to AGU in D.C. for the start of their Centennial celebrations, and I look forward to going again!