The Sunday afternoon sessions were not as diverse for me as the morning sessions, but there was some fun stuff in there.

I started off with the "digital advances" session co-sponsored by geobloggers Kyle House and Ron Schott. Working with several other organizers, Ron and Kyle put on quite a show. Kyle gave his "Get with it, Luddites!" spiel, Ian Jackson evangelized about OneGeology (a global geologic map), geoblogger Lee Allison talked about geoblogging and geotweeting (and featured the blog title banners of several GSA-attending geobloggers, including mine), and Declan De Paor (from Virginia's own Old Dominion University) showed off many of the myriad very cool digital techniques he is using. He began his talk by putting his iPhone number up on the screen and then encouraging the audience to text him their questions as he spoke, so he could read them off the iPhone propped there on the lecturn and answer them as a seamless part of his talk. Then Ron demonstrated a virtual field trip that integrated Google Earth with Giganpan imagery. When it worked, this really awed the crowd. Unfortunately, Google Earth crashed repeatedly during the demo -- which must have been frustrating for Ron. Then the talks stopped an the informal demonstrations and playing around with the technologies began on the edges of the room. Milling around in the crowd, I met for the first time fellow geobloggers Jim Repka and "Silver Fox," and chatted a bit with Kyle and Lee.

(I should also mention that I ran into Bryan of In Terra Veritas and Andrew Alden earlier in the day: geobloggers galore!)

Then I went to see Bob Hazen talk about how mineral surfaces could have provided a template for organizing biomolecules as a prelude to the origins of life. It was cool, but more of an overview talk rather than a presentation of new research.

I went to a couple of very well-attended but lackluster presentations on Sierran uplift, and then closed out the day in the structural geology session, which included an interesting study about detrital zircon populations presenting skewed age populations if the basin from which they were derived had experienced landslides. Finally, Doug Burbank of UCSB gave an invited lecture and the feedbacks between geomorphology, climate, and mountain building. I checked out a few dozen posters, and then called it a day.

Labels: geology, meetings, oregon