By Dr. Lin Chambers, NASA Scientist for GLOBE
In December 2009, I attended the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a huge annual meeting of scientists that Dr. Gatebe wrote about earlier in this space. I have been attending parts of this meeting most years since I began working in atmospheric science in the mid 1990s. This year I attended the meeting for the entire week, because I had a pre-meeting event to attend on Sunday before the conference began, and my own presentation was scheduled on Friday.
Since I had to be there all week, I deliberately decided to approach the meeting a little differently this time. I made a point of attending sessions outside of my own area of expertise. AGU includes 27 separate discipline sections, ranging from Atmospheric Science through Volcanology, so there was a lot of room for being exposed to new areas. There is also a Union section that covers timely topics from the perspective of multiple disciplines.
So I attended some sessions in Atmospheric Sciences, and Education and Human Resources, my usual haunts. But I also visited several Union sessions, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology sessions – the study of oceans and climate in pre-historical times, Global Environmental Change sessions, and Public Affairs sessions. In the process I was exposed to a huge amount of new vocabulary, including several words I still don’t understand; but which clearly had a precise meaning to the scientists in those sessions (see my prior blog on the vocabulary of science. I also got a glimpse into the many deep studies that scientists are carrying out in interesting places around the globe: ancient lakes in Europe and South America, ocean bottom sediments, caves, glaciers, etc. I also learned about some of the cutting edge new ideas that are being explored to better monitor our Earth today.
The paleo sessions were the most eye-opening experience to me, since my only exposure before this was the same as most people: reading short articles in the newspaper. It is quite a different thing to hear about this first-hand from the scientists carrying out the work. It is clear that most have a deep understanding of the kind of system they are studying; they know about related research in similar systems (for example, lakes on different continents), and they have developed an extensive framework within which to interpret the local measurements. This framework identifies and assigns dates to major events that can be seen in many locations, and allows local work to gain meaning from a wider context while avoiding the trap of drawing broad conclusions about something that may be only a local event. The old saying about “standing on the shoulders of giants” seems a propos here. Knowledge in these fields has been built step by step over many years, based on the work of many scientists.
I also attended a special lecture, the Bjerknes lecture, named after a famous meteorologist from Norway who developed much of our early understanding of weather systems. The lecturer this year was Dr. Richard Alley, a Geoscience professor from Pennsylvania State University and a well-known ice core researcher. His talk drew thousands of scientists, and was also webcast. The recording is still available if you want to get a glimpse (http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml). Again it was fascinating to hear how knowledge has evolved over time, with new discoveries continuing to explain things that were previously puzzles, gradually building a solid framework of understanding.
One challenge that I carried away from my small sampling of the thousands of talks presented at this meeting was the problem of how to integrate all this deep knowledge. If one person could have all of this information together … I think they would need extra brains to hold it together! But in this information age, finding a way to integrate all this knowledge to inform decisions about resource use and the future state of our planet is becoming more and more important. I suspect – I hope! – that one day some of you may be involved in developing solutions to that challenge.
