Oakland Geology

I don’t spend all my time out among Oakland’s rocks. I also take advantage of the Bay area’s opportunities to learn about Earth science. Every year, for instance, I attend the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held without fail in San Francisco since 1968. I started in the mid-1980s, and it’s where I’m spending this week. Last year I also started attending the annual sessions of the Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research, or CIDER, held at Berkeley on the UC campus. It’s a geology geek’s gathering that marked its tenth anniversary last Sunday. UC professor and seismologist Barbara Romanowicz, on the left, is the prime mover; unfortunately I didn’t catch the names of the other two people. CIDER uses an NSF grant to bring together senior researchers and “junior” scientists—grad students and postdocs—who pick a few meaty deep-earth topics and set up a summer workshop to attack them. Last year’s puzzles involved the chemistry of the Earth’s mantle and the nature of the core. This coming year it will be the relation of the solid Earth to climate change, a conversation long overdue among specialists.

Anyway, that meeting was last Sunday and they let me be a fly on the wall. It’s one more thing that makes Oakland the navel of the world.

This entry was posted on 16 December 2014 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Other topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.