GeoLog

A limited amount of the overall budget of the EGU General Assembly 2012 is reserved to assist young scientists to attend the assembly. The financial support may include waiving of the registration fee and a refund of the Abstract Processing Charge (APC) related to the abstract for which support was requested. Additionally, the grant may include a support for travel expenditures.

The European Geosciences Union’s definition of Young Scientist is available online and is below: by 1 January of the year when the award is presented the scientist should be:

• be in age 35* or younger.
• be an undergraduate or postgraduate (Masters/PhD) student or have received her/his highest degree qualification (e.g., BSc, MSc, PhD) within the last seven years*.

* Where appropriate, up to one year of parental leave time may be added per child.

Please note, that the Abstract Processing Charge (APC) is also applied in case of support applications.

Each support award is granted to the contact author for a particular abstract. Should this abstract be withdrawn before the meeting or should this abstract not be presented at the meeting although the author who has been awarded is present at the meeting, the award has to be returned, i.e. the author in question will be asked to register and, if necessary, to pay back the money received. Awards cannot be transferred!

There are currently three different financial support schemes run by the European Geosciences Union.

1. Young Scientist’s Travel Award for Europeans (YSTA): This award includes a free registration together with a refund of the Abstract Processing Charge (APC) related to the abstract for which support was requested. Depending on the decision of the Support Committee an additional financial support for the travel expenditures with a maximum of €300 could be granted as well. Only the granted amount mentioned in the financial support email will be paid out to the supported contact author personally during the EGU General Assembly 2012.
2. Adrian Gill Travel Award (AGTA): For a young scientist from Britain to take part in a session of the Atmospheric Sciences or Ocean Sciences programme. This award includes a free registration together with a refund of the Abstract Processing Charge (APC) related to the abstract for which support was requested. Depending on the decision of the Support Committee an additional financial support for the travel expenditures with a maximum of €300 could be granted as well. Only the granted amount mentioned in the financial support email will be paid out to the supported contact author personally during the EGU General Assembly 2012.
3. Keith Runcorn Travel Award for Non-Europeans (KRTA): This award includes a free registration together with a refund of the Abstract Processing Charge (APC) related to the abstract for which support was requested. Depending on the decision of the Support Committee an additional financial support for the travel expenditures with a maximum of €500 could be granted as well. Only the granted amount mentioned in the financial support email will be paid out to the supported contact author personally during the EGU General Assembly 2012.

Scientists, who wish to apply for financial support must be the principal author of their contribution, and they must submit an abstract by 15 December 2011. The EGU support selection committee will decide about the support of individual contribution until 28 January 2012. All applicants will be informed afterwards.

For the submission of your abstract/application for financial support, please follow the normal procedure and tick the appropriate boxes during submission. A screenshot of the first screen of the abstract submission process is shown below, the support application section is in the red box.

This information is also available on the EGU GA 2012 webpages.

Abstract submission for the EGU General Assembly 2012 (EGU2012) is now open. The General Assembly is being held from Sunday 22 Apr 2012 to Friday 27 Apr 2012 at the Austria Center Vienna, Austria.

You can browse through the Sessions online.

Each Session shows the link Abstract Submission. Using this link you are asked to log in to the Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer. You may submit the text of your contribution as plain text, LaTeX, or MS Word content. Please pay attention to the First Author Rule.

The deadline for the receipt of Abstracts is 17 January 2012. In case you would like to apply for support, please submit no later than 15 December 2011. Information about the financial support available can be found on the Support and Distinction part of the EGU GA 2012 website.

Further information about the EGU General Assembly 2012 on it’s webpages. If you have any questions email the meeting organisers Copernicus.

The deadline for the call for sessions for the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2012 is 16th September 2011. To submit a session proposal visit the EGU GA 2012 website and visit the Call for Sessions Tool. You will need to log in with your user name and password.

The public call for sessions for the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2012 has been issued. The EGU GA 2012 will be held at the Austria Center Vienna (ACV) from 22 April to 27 April 2012. The details are below, the web page to visit to submit sessions is Call for Sessions page of the EGU General Assembly 2012 website.

We hereby invite you, from now until 16 Sep 2011, to take an active part in organizing the scientific programme of the conference.

Please suggest (i) new sessions with conveners and description and (ii) modifications to the skeleton programme sessions. Explore the Programme Groups (PGs) on the left hand side, when making suggestions. Study those sessions that already exist and put your proposal into the PG that is most closely aligned with the proposed session’s subject area.

If the subject area of your proposal is strongly aligned with two or more PGs, co-organization is possible and encouraged between PGs. Only put your session proposal into one PG, and you will be able to indicate PGs that you believe should be approached for co-organization.

If you have questions about the appropriateness of a specific session topic, please contact the Officers for the specific EGU2012 Programme Group. To suggest Union Symposia, Great Debates, Townhall Meetings or Short Courses, please contact the Programme Committee Chair (Gert-Jan Reichart).

In case any questions arise, please contact EGU2012 at Copernicus.

One of the finalists in the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2011 Photo Competition was an image from Russell Garwood. This image was not a traditional photograph but a 3D reconstruction of a 312 million year old arachnid Eophrynus prestvicii, from a CT scan of the fossil. The image itself will be the feature for the Imaggeo Mondays post on 16th May. However, due to the different nature of the image Russell has put together a brief description of the image and how it was created.

Russell Garwood is a invertebrate palaeontologist who is currently based at the Natural History Museum in London. He has a personal research webpage. He presented work on Tomographic reconstruction in palaeontology at the EGU General Assembly 2011.

Many Carboniferous fossils, such as this specimen of Eophrynus prestvicii, are found as three-dimensional voids within siderite (iron carbonate) concretions. This means that traditional palaeontological techniques – for example, splitting the rock open and inspecting the surface revealed – result in incomplete data recovery. Such limitations can be overcome with the aid of x-ray micro-tomography (XMT), a high-resolution form of CT scanning. This remarkably complete specimen of Eophrynus prestvicii was first described in 1871, and was used three years ago to test the applicability of XMT to siderite-hosted fossils, resulting in this image. The XMT provided a slice-based (tomographic) dataset. Custom software (called SPIERS) was used to threshold and clean each slice, and then define regions of interest. This allowed the limbs to be rendered separately and coloured. The image you see was then created by outputting a finished ‘virtual fossil’ as a mesh, and using the open source ray-tracer Blender to model it under user-defined lighting conditions. The reconstruction reveals an arachnid with heavy armour – presumably a defensive adaptation – and also showed, for the first time, the mouthparts (or chelicerae) of the species. Representatives of the order to which this species belongs, the Trigonotarbida, were amongst the earliest terrestrial predators. While this Carboniferous (~311 million year old) specimen postdates these early examples of the order by many millions of years, it too was a predator, probably running down its prey with its long limbs. The same techniques has now been applied to a wide range of the arthropods living in these Carboniferous coal forests. The image first appeared in the publication Garwood et al. (2009). A more comprehensive introduction to these techniques can be found in the publication Garwood et al. (2010).

Garwood, R.J., Dunlop, J.A. & Sutton, M.D. 2009. High-fidelity X-ray micro-tomography reconstruction of siderite-hosted Carboniferous arachnids. Biology Letters, 5(6):841-844. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0464 link, , requires subscription for full article]
Garwood, R.J., Rahman, I.A. & Sutton, M.D. 2010. From clergymen to computers – the advent of virtual palaeontology. Geology Today, 26(3):96-100.
doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2451.2010.00753.x link, requires subscription for full article

This is the last in a series of posts (Part 1, Part 2) with descriptions and online locations of Geocinema films. A film’s inclusion in the Geocinema does not mean that EGU endorses any opinions expressed in the film. If you have a film you’d like to submit for the Geocinema at the EGU GA 2012 look out for the call.

Inspection Exercise in Jordan, 6 mins [Online]
This film discusses a simulated on-site inspection exercise that was carried out in regards to monitoring compliance of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

Listening for Nuclear Noise, 5 mins [Online]
This film discusses some of the technology used to monitor compliance of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. In particular the technology that goes into a typical infrasound monitoring station, this particular station is located in the Bavarian Forest.

EISCAT_3D, our window to geospace, 7 min [Online]
FFAB:UK, together with EISCAT Scientific Association, has produced an information film about the EISCAT_3D project. It explains the background, the concept, and some of the new science that will be possible when the EISCAT_3D facilities are completed.

Earth System Trailer, 7 mins [Online]
Trailer for a documentary feature about climate, what the scientists know, what is unknown and what needs to be done to improve our stewardship of this planet. ESS trailer explores the need for next generation supercomputing to develop climate models which are a prerequisite to predicting climate change with scientific certainty.

SNORTEX – Snow reflectance transition experiment, 10 mins [Online]
The video introduces the SNORTEX (Snow Reflectance Transition Experiment) campaign taken place in Sodankylä (lat. 67.4N), Finland, in spring 2009. An overview on the background, objectives and expected scientific outcome of the campaign is given. Experimental methods and equipment employed in ground-based and air-borne measurements of snow reflectance and characterization of snow properties are presented.

Science@ESA: Solar System, Siblings of Earth and the Moon and Titan, 54 mins total [Online, with others]
In these Science@ESA vodcasts Rebecca Barnes looks at the Solar System. We’ll discover the scale and structure of the Solar System, find out why we explore it and introduce the European missions launched on a quest to further investigate our local celestial neighbourhood. We’ll look at two of the terrestrial planets: Venus and Mars, explore their similarities and differences to Earth and find out about the European missions that are helping to unravel their mysteries. Finally we’ll look at the Earth’s Moon and Titan, two very different natural satellites in our Solar System, and find out about the two ESA missions that have explored them.

Huygens probe landing on Earthlike world, 5 mins [Online]
This short film documents spectacular descent of ESA’s Huygens on Saturn’s giant moon Titan.

This year, we offer for the first time to upload your oral presentation as well as your poster as Power Point or PDF files for online publication alongside your abstract. This gives all participants the chance to revisit your contribution.

To declare your copyright and to enable this open access publication your presentation will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The upload of your presentation is free of charge and is not followed by a review process. All legal and technical information as well as the upload form are available online at the meeting homepage. You’ll need to log in using your Copernicus Office User ID [using the ID of the Corresponding Author].

This year on the EGU General Assembly blog there will be guest posts from participants about their research and their impressions of sessions. These are personal points of view not EGU corporate views. If you would like to contribute a research or session viewpoint, please email us.

This perspective from the European Geosciences Union General Asembly 2011 is from Joe Kasprzyk, who is a a PhD candidate at Penn State University, USA. His research was presented in a talk in HS5.4 Advances in Modeling of Coupled Hydrologic-Socioeconomic Systems .

I am very happy I was able to attend EGU 2011 and am honoured to contribute this blog post. In this post, I’d like to briefly introduce my research and some emerging areas of focus for hydrological sciences and water management and then discuss the importance of researchers in my field attending the EGU meeting.

The goal of my research is to aid sustainable decision making within environmental systems using risk-based water management, which includes feedbacks between social, natural, and built systems. Currently this involves studies that use many-objective solution techniques to quantify the tradeoffs between conflicting objectives. An example of these conflicting objectives is in minimizing the cost of a water supply system while maximizing its reliability. The situation is more complicated when other objectives are considered, however, including minimizing surplus water for municipal use that can be considered a proxy for other regional uses. To aid in solving this problem, our research combines the solution tools with interactive visual analytics that can involve stakeholders in showing them the consequences of different policy and engineering decisions.

Using a case study of a water market in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, USA, we started by exploring the effects of adding market instruments on the city’s many objective tradeoffs ^[1], and then proposed a de Novo planning framework that adaptively introduces new problem learning in an iterative process ^[2]. My future research will address the Susquehanna River Basin to aid the sustainability of water for competing water uses of municipal supply, electricity generation, and environmental flows.

There is increasing concern over the impact of increasing populations, amplified hydrologic variability, and climate change on water management. Future research should continue to provide tools for addressing these challenges, and this will necessarily involve interactions with scientists in different fields and from varied regions. One relevant research question, for example, is how does the time scale of observing environmental changes affect the time scale of decision making processes? The set of preferences for decision makers now may not be the same as in the next generation, especially given the availability of new information within subsequent planning horizons. Another concern is incorporating diverse uses into economic frameworks, especially those for which it is difficult to provide a monetized value of utility. Modeling of ecosystem processes will help inform this decision-making process, but the large amount of uncertainty present may not be able to be fully reduced.

These challenges have a direct connection to the value of international meetings such as the EGU General Assembly, because scientists from across many disciplines can discuss research and ideas throughout the whole conference program. Beyond just interdisciplinary work, though, I find it enlightening that we can interact across national boundaries as well. The concept of governance is a central one to water management since this directly constrains the breadth of actions that can be taken to react to change. Data availability, stakeholder preferences, and regulatory environment can all vary from country to country and I have learned much about this here at the conference.

I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to this blog, and I would be glad to interact with you if you have any questions through e-mail.

References:
[1] Kasprzyk, J., Reed, P., Kirsch, B., Characklis, G. (2009) “Managing Population and Drought Risks Using Many-Objective Water Portfolio Planning Under Uncertainty” Water Resour. Res., 45, W12401, doi:10.1029/2009WR008121
[2] Kasprzyk, J., Reed, P., Characklis, G., Kirsch, B. (In Review) “Many Objective de Novo Water Supply Portfolio Planning Under Deep Uncertainty” Env. Mod. Soft.

This year on the EGU General Assembly blog there will be guest posts from participants about their research and their impressions of sessions. These are personal points of view not EGU corporate views. If you would like to contribute a research or session viewpoint, please email us.

This perspective from the European Geosciences Union General Asembly 2011 is from Thomas Smith about how to maximise your poster presentation. Thomas’ research was presented in NH7.2/AS4.14/BG2.17 Fire in the Earth System: Impacts and Feedbacks.

iPosters

In a world of multi-touch interfaces, e-readers, and televisions the size of cinema screens, it is not hard to imagine the day when the poster boards at the EGU general assembly are replaced by large, interactive devices, automatically downloading their designated poster for each day from “the cloud”. In the mean time, I decided that I would compliment my paper poster with an online interactive poster (iPoster!).

With three days until my poster presentation in the session on ‘Fire in the Earth System: Impacts and Feedbacks’, I was offered the opportunity to present my poster as a summary in the oral programme of the session. Whilst struggling to summarise my poster in four Powerpoint slides, it occurred to me that it would be much better to simply exhibit the poster as a Prezi, a navigable, zoomable, interactive poster, complete with photo and video galleries. Not only did this go down well in the poster summary, but it also proved useful when describing my research in the poster session itself. If you have a poster presentation, but feel that animations or videos are important to communicate your research, this is a very good way of integrating the audiovisuals with your poster.

No doubt, many of you savvy EGU blog readers are familiar with ‘Prezi’, one of the rising stars in alternatives to the linear presentation style prescribed by the likes of Powerpoint. If not, then you should at least take a look (Prezi Homepage). Prezi is difficult to describe without demonstration, although I shall try. Imagine a Google Earth for your presentation slides; you can begin with an overview contained in the field of view of your audience, before moving into sections, but always within the context of the initial overview; Prezi allows you to customise a route through your text, images and videos, using flashy animation (like moving from location to location in Google Earth) to navigate and zoom around the information you wish to disseminate. As with all developing web-based tools, there are a few issues, particularly with the narrow range of supported video formats, limited text formatting tools and some issues with image scaling (it’s best to convert your images to pdfs). Prezi is free for educational use, however, and the reaction from your audience will be worth that exploratory effort.

So whilst we are stuck with our temperamental printers, unruly paper, and comical dancing acts in front of our poster boards for now, at least it is possible to point to an animated version of the poster on a laptop or tablet screen. How long will it be before iPosters take that step from sidekick on the pedestal to the main board?

My interactive poster can be viewed online.

All the webstreamed events at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly are available online still. Please share with those you think will find them useful.

Webstreaming Page.

The events from the EGU GA 2011 that are available are:
US1 A Planet Under Pressure
US2 The Future of Water Cycle Earth Observing Systems
US3 How Science Can Aid Society in Tackling Emerging Risks
US4 The 22 February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake
US5 The 11 March 2011 Tohoku (Sendai) Earthquake and Tsunami
GDG1 How will Europe face the raw materials crisis?
UMC1 What are the unresolved questions and future perspectives for palaeoclimate research? An EGU Masterclass by André Berger and Wolfgang H. Berger
ML1 Alfred Wegener Medal Lecture – Understanding the drivers of environmental changes in West Africa from sedimentary deep-sea records by Gerold Wefer
ML2 Arthur Holmes Medal Lecture – Three grand challenges in geomorphology: rock, climate, and life by William E. Dietrich
ML3 Jean Dominique Cassini Medal Lecture – Highlights of ESA’s Planetary Sciences Programme Achievements and a Glimpse into the Future by Jean-Pierre Lebreton
US0 EGU Award Ceremony

Also the press conferences are available;
Press Conference 1 A new science plan for ocean drilling – The Future of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program
Press Conference 2 Polar Ozone – What’s going on in the Arctic?
Press Conference 3 What can we do about Europe’s raw materials crisis?
Press Conference 4 Unlocking climate and sea level secrets since the Last Glacial Maximum – Results from the IODP Great Barrier Reef Environmental Changes Expedition
Press Conference 5 Geothermal energy versus CO2-storage: can we use the underground more than once?
Press Conference 6 GOCE & GRACE: global impacts of the ever changing surface of the Earth, recent mission results
Press Conference 7 Emerging risks and natural hazards: a multi-stakeholder approach to understanding and managing extremes
Press Conference 8 Oxygen Depletion – Triple Trouble
Press Conference 9 The 22 February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake
Press Conference 10 Tsunami impact and Tsunami Early Warning Systems