The European Geoscience Union (EGU) General Assembly is an always busy conference with many sessions happening at the same time. While the cryosphere session is a good session to meet other scientists with an interest in the polar regions, it is not the only one as many other sessions feature interesting cryosphere-related contributions. Currently, the EGU takes place once per year in Vienna, Austria.
Here, we will give you a small overview of how the conference attendance for an early career scientist can look like based on the experience of the four APECS Germany Board members Alexandra, Lena, Lennart and Marek.
Personal attendance and presentations
Scientific presentations come in three different formats at the EGU and three board members presented their current research. Lena and Marek both gave an oral presentation, while Alexandra had a poster presentation. The third option is a PICO presentation, where a short teaser is given and then people can choose which poster to attend.
During an oral presentation, the presenter gives an approximately 8 minute long presentation in a ten minute time slot. This allows time for one to two questions afterwards before the next speaker. Lena presented on Wednesday how warm water masses could potentially access the grounding lines of the Antarctic Ice Sheet by looking at high-resolution bathymetry data. The presentation featured results explained in more depth in this preprint. On Thursday, Marek presented modeling results on the formation of sea ice pressure ridges using a discrete element method model.
Contrary to the oral presentations, the time slots for poster presentations are longer with around one to two hours time slots, where poster presenters are supposed to be close to their posters allowing for more in-depth discussions. Finally, on Friday afternoon during the last slot of the conference, Alexandra presented her poster. Despite the time, she had a good attendance of people at her poster and very valuable scientific discussions.
Next to the scientific sessions, divisions often organize networking events as well. The Cryosphere Division organized the CryoDrinks on Wednesday evening, which all four Board members joined. About 100 cryosphere-interested people met for dinner and drinks and continued discussions, exchanged ideas and experiences and met new people.
APECS Networking event
Additionally, we organized an APECS networking event together with APECS ExCom. This meeting was a Splinter Meeting which took place on Monday. The meeting was attended by members from different National Committees (NCs) around Europe (Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, UK and Denmark) with up to 30 attendees.
The meeting began with a short introduction on APECS, then each NC that was present gave a short update on their activities. Some NCs used this opportunity to announce possible collaborations. After that, the attendees had the chance to connect with each other during a speed-networking. At this point, the meeting slowly faded into group networking in a really nice way. We were able to distribute some merchandise and received lots of positive feedback, with an emphasis on how nice it was to finally meet fellow APECS members.
Working at EGU
Another perspective on EGU24 was provided by Lennart, who worked at the conference which fitted perfectly with his semester abroad in Vienna. In his role as poster assistant, he kept track of the tight schedule in the poster halls and made sure that everyone found their assigned place for their poster.
Working at the EGU is a great opportunity to get your first impressions of a large scientific conference while also getting paid. Additionally, for other (non-resident) students this could be a nice spring adventure in Vienna. Registration is possible via the EGU website.
Authors: Marek Muchow, Alexandra Zuhr, Lena Nicola, Lennart Spielmann