The scientific sessions begin today here in Portland, and my personal scheduler has me seeing sessions on basaltic volcanism, Precambrian life and history (which are closely related, perhaps more so than in more recent geologic history), delamination of the lithosphere and a bunch of posters. Today and throughout the meeting, I will try to jot down some highlights in this post. Mind you, I'm limited to what I can do with my iPod Touch, which is a fine handheld computer but not the laptop I'm accustomed to. I decided to go truly mobile this year.
UPDATE: I was entertained by the morning talks on what basalt has done to the Pacific Northwest, drowning the ancestral Columbia River system and forcing it to reorganize repeatedly. For all the havoc wrought by the Channeled Scabland megafloods, the Miocene mega-lava-floods were orders of magnitude worse. Imagine some 50,000 cubic kilometers of lava bursting out over the space of four days up in Washington state.
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