EGU 2014 – the conference of champions!

Well it’s that time of year – the time where if you email an academic, chances are you will get an out of office response. It’s not business time – those aren’t business socks, they are conference socks! It’s conference time!! In the last month I have attended two very different conferences. The first, the Unconventional Gas conference in Aberdeen was an industry conference. Most of the presenters were forum companies reporting on the state of the oil and gas industry in the UK and overseas. It was a practical conference, run by practical people and whilst I was there I had lots of really interesting discussions about the real-life applications of my research.

The second conference I attended was Evolving Science Communication, at UWE in Bristol. This conference focussed on science communication in all it’s forms and was attended mostly by people who had done a degree in Science Communication with UWE at some point. This conference was much smaller, with less of the practicality feeling and more of an entrepreneurial spirit, which is often found in the science communication field due to the developing nature of Sci comm as a discipline.

Both of these conferences were great in their own ways, but this week is the big one. This week I am attending EGU’s (the European Geoscience Union) annual General Assembly. This is THE biggest conference for geoscientists in Europe (only beaten by the American Geoscience Union annual conference) and is attended by tens of thousands of scientists who over the week will present data from over 15,000 abstracts from every area of geoscience research imaginable. And I’ll be there too – my session is on Friday the 2nd of May so each day I’ll write about a session I attended, hopefully with an interview with one of the scientists and at the end of the week I’ll do a summary of the whole experience.