Today is the last day of the week-long meeting. Only reporters, staffers and generalists come to the whole event, and not even all of them do. But today the exhibitors strike their tents and signs and racks; the pressroom stops feeding the writers; the afternoon sessions sometimes feel a bit forlorn, with the convenors praising the hard-core people who are there.

I'll be attending a morning session dedicated to the EarthScope project and the results starting to pour in after several years of operation. We have excellent new images of the lower crust and upper mantle under the western United States, and dense networks of GPS sensors and seismographs in place learning new details of crustal motions. In the afternoon I'll be at a series of talks on the Galilean moons of Jupiter, a very fine thing as the 400th anniversary of their discovery approaches on January 7.

Background:
EarthScope
Jupiter's moon Io, the real "volcano world"

Today has a light schedule of sessions, a short one on earthquake swarms in Washington and Oregon, and in the afternoon a strange set of talks on "Serendipitous Correlations and Synchronized Chaos in Nonlinear Geophysics"—and of course all the posters. Today is also the last day of the exhibition,a good time to visit the exhibitions to make good deals on books, fossils, specimens and equipment.

Today will be the most strenuous of my week: from 8 a.m. til mid-afternoon I'll be seeing talks on Near-Earth Objects and the Terminal Dryas event, purportedly a cosmic impact about 13,000 years ago that caused widespread destruction in North America and sent the world into a thousand-year glacial cold snap. Researchers have been gathering evidence both for and against this hypothesis, and it will be fascinating to watch. (My previous post on this topic went into some of the carnival atmosphere around this story. And Archaeology Guide Kris Hirst has posted on this topic here and here.) The last part of the afternoon will involve talks on historic and ancient earthquakes; then comes a dinner meeting of the Northern California Science Writers Association where I will stuff myself silly with Indian food and shout myself hoarse in the crowd of writers.

And I almost forgot: lunch will be courtesy of the AGU at a gathering of geology bloggers. Besides some fellow bloggers I already know, the gang should include the writers putting together AGU's own Fall Meeting blog.

You can follow some of the action live from your own desktop; look at the list of webcasts from the meeting.

Looks like I'll be seeing a lot of talks about earthquakes today, mostly about the latest in early-warning systems. But I'll also drop in on a session on earthquake statistics, for the Nonlinear Geophysics group. Those people intimidate me, being the farthest thing from geologists and the nearest to mathematicians. But the brain could use a little stretch, right? In the afternoon I'll see what we've been learning recently about Mercury, and at the day's end is the Gutenberg Lecture, given by John Vidale and covering tremor, the strange deep shuddering that I've referred to off and on here over the last five years.

Background:
Quake alerts before the shaking starts
Introduction to earthquakes
Geology of the planet Mercury