Thanks for a great #AGU20

Thursday marked the final day of live programming for #AGU20, concluding 13 full days over three weeks of presenting, learning and connecting. Thanks to all the session chairs and conveners, presenters, plenary speakers and panelists, and all of the attendees for helping create the largest, longest, most engaging conference of any type of the year. And thanks to the Fall Meeting Program Committee, Council, and many AGU Committees, programs, and partners that created and enriched the full meeting. Collectively, the AGU community showed what is possible.

Especially noteworthy was how the meeting showcased the enthusiasm about Earth and space science and its broad and deep connection to society (just browse the #AGU20 twitter thread), the sharing of the science (more than 1,000 attendees participated in Sketch your Science), and even the fun: the pictures of you watching at home – including with your pets and kids, and the attendance at the Virtu-ale Happy Hours and various meet-up sessions. Patience and resilience also helped make the meeting work.

The closing plenary, a panel discussion with AGU members led by science rapper Baba Brinkman, and his final “rap up,” highlighted some of the emergent themes that carried through the meeting, including the growing importance of deeper engagement with society, and the importance of promoting justice, equity, inclusivity, and diversity for improving science. This was highlighted by the broader participation from scientists from countries outside the U.S. and other first-time attendees, and recognition of the lasting value of indigenous knowledges (from Alexander von Humboldt forward), international collaboration, open, FAIR data, convergent science showcased by the rich GeoHealth and COVID-19 sessions, and the many extra challenges faced by students, particularly this year. And we learned that while birds can save the planet, it is really through people and science that we will move forward.

Although the live, formal program is over, access to Fall Meeting content is not. All presentations and recordings are available to Fall Meeting registrants through 15 February 2021. Please keep sharing the cool, impactful, valuable science and commentary, and help other attendees find it. For presenters, you have an option of making your content public and permanent on ESSOAr.org –look for a post here with further information in the next few days.

#AGU20 was in many ways a large experiment, created from a planned in-person meeting, and building off prior experiments and input. Your help and thoughts are needed to improve the experience and explore new possibilities. Please look for and respond to a meeting survey from AGU in early 2021. Your input is needed and valuable.

Here are some preliminary numbers as we wrap up #AGU20. We will share more in January.

• More than 25,000 thousand attendees registered from over 110 countries around the world.
• When we add posters, oral presentations, union and named lectures, we had almost 585,000 assets viewed.
• This means that each attendee watched more than 23 videos, on average.
• Looking at all our video assets, if you watched nothing but Fall Meeting 2020 content for 24 hours a day, we have roughly four months of content.

You can find our daily wrap ups from each day on From the Prow and here are a few sessions from Thursday, 17 December, that you may want to add to your on-demand schedule:

• The final installment of an innovative session on geoscience careers.
• INV15 – Moving Beyond the Standard: A Transdisciplinary Virtual Event for Early-Career Scientists included sessions on supporting international scholars and collaboration, a conversation on failures, JEDI, art in geosciences and COVID-19.
• Oral and poster sessions:
  • H222 – Precipitation Partitioning by Vegetation I eLightning
  • A254 – Arctic and Midlatitude Linkage: Causes and Effects I
  • P088 – Mercury: From MESSENGER to BepiColombo I
  • GC132 – Earth Observation Applications to Agriculture and Food Security System Shocks I
  • MR028 – Physical Properties of Earth Materials (PPEM): Using the Whole Toolbox to Understand Rock Deformation I
  • C069 – Sea Ice Change and Variability: Implications for the Climate and Indigenous Communities of High-Latitude Systems I
  • EP069 – Global Geochemical Cycles and Earth’s Climate over Geologic Time I eLightning
  • B128 – Tropical Forests Under a Changing Environment II
  • S069 – Seismology Contributions: Structural Seismology I
• Some posters to check out:
  • https://twitter.com/SandraYMendiola/status/1339268856808955907
  • https://twitter.com/stabile_tony/status/1339287576826556422
  • https://twitter.com/BarbaraBomfim18/status/1339287250849259521
  • https://twitter.com/EricFielding/status/1339287109325058048
  • https://twitter.com/milja001/status/1339321867656712192
  • https://twitter.com/Harry_Leah/status/1339347411311980547

News coming out of #AGU20 includes:

• Students Monitor Campus Noise in Seismic Silence. Eos, 17 December. Researchers are engaging their students with low-cost seismology research to monitor local noise on campus.
• Rethinking the Concept of Virtual Water in the Global Trade Market. Eos, 17 December. Discussions around global trade are starting to consider the water it takes to produce exported goods. Some scientists argue that this approach should take a regional rather than global perspective.
• Cities have the power to worsen extreme weather events. The Independent, 16 December. Cities have such powerful effects on the atmosphere that they have the potential to amplify extreme weather events, new research has discovered.
• Wheat absorbs phosphorus from desert dust. The Economist, 16 December. Some 12,000 years after relations between people and wheat began, a wheat plant has been caught doing something unexpected. It helped itself to a dose of much-needed phosphorus when its leaves received a coating of desert dust.
• Meet Au-Spot, the AI robot dog that’s training to explore caves on Mars. Live Science, 17 December. Mars exploration is going to the dogs. The robot dogs, that is.

And save the date for Fall Meeting 2021: 13-17 December in New Orleans, Louisiana. We hope it will be safe to have a hybrid event that is in person and also leverages our experience from this year to include a virtual program that again expands opportunities for engagement. We will share more information soon.

Until then, hoping that your New Year is happy and healthy, and see you in 2021! Stay safe.