GSA Report #2

It's Wednesday morning and raining steadily, unlike this shot from Monday morning. GSA Annual meeting events at the Oregon Convention Center are winding down somewhat: many geologists leave Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, though talks and posters continue through the day, and post-meeting field trips and short courses are still to come.
The exhibit hall, combined with the poster hall and graduate school recruiting booths, is huge - none of the pictures I've taken really show the size - I'd need to stitch together a full-circle panorama, but maybe you can get an idea from this picture showing a portion of half of the exhibits. Photos aren't allowed in the poster area behind me.
Geologists, guests, and exhibitors walk down the "Geoscience Highway" - this is the center area of the exhibit hall, with the photo looking from one end to the other. About half the exhibits are on each side of this central dividing area. This year, the GSA has internet cafes of ready-to-use computers scattered through the meeting halls, including one inside the exhibits. Wifi is available everywhere that I've tried connecting, for those who've brought their own computers or smartphones.
One of the reasons I've always liked coming to annual and sectional GSA meetings is to cruise the rock and mineral booths. This year, there are many; they offer rocks, minerals, fossils, jewelry, and other items made from polished rock and stone.

And now for a summary of where I've been and what I've done. Yesterday, I spent a good portion of the morning and afternoon in the SEG sessions on Magmas and Volatiles: Linking Granites, Volcanoes, Geothermal Systems, and Mineral Deposits I & II (158 and 204). These sessions covered a wide range of topics from porphyry copper deposits to Carlin-type gold deposits, from zircons to fluid inclusions, and from subduction to low-angle normal faulting.

In the afternoon, I also bounced around the convention center, going to talks by various individuals including one by my first employer and mentor, a talk by geoblogger Brian Romans (200-8), and a talk by geoblogger Kim Hannula (200-12).

For the evening, I was invited to the QG&G awards meeting by Bud Burke, an old friend of mine from ties that go back as far as early grad school. I saw several old friends there, reconnected with people I hadn't expected to see, and actually managed to conduct some business relating to a Pleistocene lake in central Nevada. A paper about the lake will finally be published; I'll be a co-author when it comes out, probably because I provided the initial information about the area and was there when the first work was done, and because I tried to get the ball rolling on the article way back in the early 1990's. I'll say more about that when the paper is published.

Today I plan to be in the SEG sessions most of the day: morning and afternoon.

Be the way, summary posts about the GSA meetings by various geobloggers can be found at this GSA page: From the Blogosphere. I don't think the list is complete.