The science-meeting experience

While you're waiting for me to report from San Francisco, here's a diary I posted during the 2000 AGU meeting, hoping to give my readers a taste of the meeting experience.

I always get a warm feeling at meetings. When I was still in high school, my parents enabled me to attend an out-of-town meeting on my own (I think it was the GSA, in the late 1960s). The ferment of fresh science and the presence of people from all over the world was stimulating. This was something that science books didn't mention about the scientific life, but it's one of the three pillars of a geological career: the field, the lab and meeting hall (the fourth is the classroom if you're an academic).

_{Waiting for e-mail at AGU, 2004 — Geology Guide photo}