mega-conference

here i am, sitting at one of the very long and very crowded tables set up in the moscone convention center in san-francisco, typing on my laptop like a hundred other geo-scientists. it's monday morning and there are already thousands of people here... throughout the week, the number of attendees is expected to top 13000. across from me are a couple of russians talking about something or other, and down the table are some korean researchers. agu is an interesting mix of people... from nations all over the globe and familiar with very different niches within the earth-sciences, yet all in one place and for the most part all speaking the same language: sciencese. for all the faces i don't know, i'm surprised by how many people i do know. colleagues from universities in the united states, france, italy, argentina and taiwan.

the geoscience community is actually pretty small, even when walking through a crowd of ten thousand people makes it seem like anything but.

~t