AMQUA 2010!

My initial intent this weekend was to blog from my hotel while away at my meeting. However late evening out and catching up with friends and colleagues made that difficult. I'm now back in Albuquerque, with my new home internet (yay!), and ready to recap the weekend.

This past weekend I was at the University of Wyoming in Laramie for the biennial meeting of the American Quaternary Association, a professional/academic organization for those who study the Quaternary. These meeting give people a chance to network and show off their research. The focus of the meeting was the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, which is what I study. I gave a poster on changes in environmental gradients based and changes in small mammal ranges during this time. There were four students from Penn State, and we all had posters. I think we pretty well represented the diversity of research that is going on in vertebrate paleontology in the Geosciences department at PSU, and I feel like we all had really interesting posters.

Here's a free hat I got. Notice the cowboy riding a mastodon.

In addition to the poster sessions, there were talks that went throughout the meeting that ranged on a variety of subjects: paleontology, paleobotany, archaeology, landscapes, and soils to name a few. The underlying connection was our study of the Quaternary. Russ gave a talk on biotic changes during the late Pleistocene, and to my surprise, had a slide with my work on it to entice people to go see my poster.

Saturday afternoon there was a special set of talks on the highly controversial Younger Dryas Boundry (YDB) impact hypothesis. The Younger Dryas is a period of time in the late Pleistocene that represents a very quick cooling trend right before the warming into the Pleistocene. The YDB impact hypothesis states that some kind of extraterrestrial impact caused the Younger Dryas and precipitated the environmental and biotic changes at that time. Very few people actually think this hypothesis holds any water: there are some serious issues with reproducibility of results that support the hypothesis, and the timing of biotic events don't quite match up. There are a lot of problems with the hypothesis, so much so that I could spend an entire blog post on the subject. The symposium on the meeting was really interesting, and it makes we want to go back to the original literature and read more about it. These kinds of controversies can get kind of messy, with personal attacks from one scientist on another. One unfortunate thing is that some of the scientists who have presented evidence against the YDB impact hypothesis, and who I tend to agree with, are kind of arrogant. So while I agree with much of their work, I think they need to rethink what they say and their attitude.

This was a very enjoyable meeting in general. The Penn State Students kind of got blown off for dinner by the rest of the student community at the meeting, but aside from that I was happy with all the people I talked to and the time I spent with people important to me. Any time I get a chance to hang out with one of Russ's advisers, it's a good time. There are just too many hilarious stories that get shared at these things, and you get to know the people you work with on a more personal level. I'm just lucky that the people I collaborate with are such nice and interesting characters. I have noticed, however, that when I meet up with my classmates my true colors as a geologist start to show. Especially if there are copious amounts of beer, even worse if it is free beer. There were time when I was laughing so hard that I cried. Also, by the end of the meeting, I couldn't help talking in a really bad New York accent and quoting My Cousin Vinny, thanks to my ridiculous friends.

Sunday was a travel day, which consisted of driving back to Denver, waiting around and drinking beer at the airport, and making my way back to Albuquerque. Through my own fault, I didn't schedule my flights early enough and had to talk a detour through Las Vegas to get back to NM. My flight was delayed by over an hour, so I sat around in the Vegas airport for longer than I ever wanted to. That airport of kind of dumpy, which surprised me. There were, however, lots and lots of slot machines. I'm happy to say, I didn't gamble any during my stay there. To put all of this into perspective: it is a 1 hour direct flight from Denver, CO to Albuquerque, NM. It took me about 6 hours to finally get home from the time I got on the plane in Denver to the time I stepped off in ABQ.

The flight into Vegas is really pretty, and I don't mean the buildings or the casinos. The landscape and views from the plane were just amazing. I didn't see the Grand Canyon, I was on the wrong side of the plane and we were too far north, however I saw Lake Mead. Lake Mead is kind of a weird feature, seeing as how this is a desert and suddenly there is the enormous body of water created by man. There was also a few mountain ranges we flew over and dozens of canyons that had been eroded through time by rivers. There is this cool dendritic pattern, and viewed from the air it looks like art. The colors are also just unbelievably beautiful, splashes of reds, oranges and tans. I'd like to go back and actually explore these areas, although the terrain looks pretty rough.

The view of Las Vegas at night is pretty neat too, though I couldn't for the life of me get a picture that wasn't blurry.

So I'm back now in my apartment, and it's good to be back here with Matt. I missed him, he should really come along on one of these meetings some time, I think he'd have fun.