I resolved to stretch my brain at a session on "Scaling and Multifractals: Extremes, Transport, Hydrology and Geomorphology." Such sessions can be stimulating as workers in distant specialties interact, or as some expert in a field I never heard of shows up to dazzle the room. Those things happened, but I confess that my brain cracked under the strain. Stefan Boettcher talked about self-organized criticality (SOC), the concept we use to describe things like the avalanches on sand piles that are self-similar—they look the same at all sizes. On his faculty Web site he explains his work on a fast numerical model of SOC. Now he doesn't need to experiment with piles of rice any more.
Seismologist Yan Kagan talked about the distribution of the largest earthquakes. They don't seem to fit the Gutenberg-Richter relation, a power law that works for smaller shocks. Are there more or fewer than we should expect? He concluded that statistics gives us no traction—more time and more great quakes will be necessary.
The standout intellect, as far as I could tell, was Didier Sornette, who laid out his research into world population and world economic production. Both population and output, he said, are heading for a day of reckoning (he calls it a "spontaneous singularity") at the same time, around the year 2050. This is a novel approach to the great topic, "will we save ourselves with our genius before we kill ourselves with our impact on the world?" He sits on the side of genius, but he has little idea of what our world will become after that date. All he can say is that it will be "a transition to qualitatively new behavior." You can read his theory at leisure in his preprint on the Los Alamos preprint archive, a very cool thing in itself.
I wasn't bored, but I was definitely missing most of what was going on, so I bailed out at the coffee break to see the posters. Here's what caught my eye.
- A kite-borne instrument platform is used in Kansas to monitor the atmosphere all night.
- Lightning on Jupiter appears to occur 100 kilometers down in the clouds and is 10 times bigger than anything on Earth.
- To find clean data for your next climate or environmental model, visit the History Database of the Global Environment HYDE.
- Project NEPTUNE will wire the entire Juan de Fuca plate with seafloor instruments, linked and powered by cable.
- There could be forms of life—kinetotrophs—that survive by harnessing motion for energy, and others that live on heat, pressure, gravity, and magnetic forces. They could live in or on other planets, or maybe even our own.
- Our oxygenated atmosphere was inevitable once life began forming methane 4 billion years ago, and the same should be true on other Earthlike planets.
- The 1906 San Francisco earthquake triggered earthquakes elsewhere in California, according to work done by a Caltech undergraduate.
- A trenching study on the San Andreas fault stood out because an aerial photo of the site was taken from a kite.
- Small earthquakes in Taiwan—not large ones and not microquakes—were found to respond to the phase of the moon.
My last session of the day was a catch-all series of talks about research into the ancient oceans. The results were less important than the methods being tested and improved. This is the true grunt work of geoscience, and the same dedication, cooperation and cameraderie lauded at the medal ceremony on Sunday was apparent in this small and specialized gathering.
There were no dramatic advances here, just many glints of intimate insight. An example was the talk by Nicolas Caillon, who's looking at the famous Vostok ice core in extreme detail. He's focusing on one aspect of ice behavior—the rate at which snow becomes ice. In the half-snow, half-ice known as firn, gases in the air can move slightly, blurring their history as recorded in the ice core. Caillon detected the gravitational sorting of the heavy isotope argon-40 in this firn zone, an incredibly tiny effect. The sorting depends on the rate that ice forms at the base of the firn and also on temperature, and he presented an intricate set of comparisons to the deuterium and carbon dioxide records. Each discrepancy can be turned into a scrap of information—a widespread theme in this golden age of Earth science.
As I left the hall for the last time there seemed to be more hugging and handshaking than usual among the crowd, but also more speed. We all have lives to resume and work to do, and renewed energy for that work.
PS: Here's a list of stories that stemmed from scientific results presented at the meeting. Many were written up by more than one reporter, and the differences are intriguing. (Links checked March 2009)
