AGU Joint Assembly: Press conference schedule

1. Press Conferences

The following schedule of press conferences is subject to change, before or during Joint Assembly. Press conferences may be added or dropped, their titles and emphases may change, and participants may change. All updates to this schedule will be announced in the Press Room (MTCC, South Building, Level 700, Room 709). Press conferences take place in the Press Conference Room (Room 712), which is across the hall.

Times for press conferences are Eastern Daylight Time. Session numbers at the end of each press conference listing may show only the first in a series of related sessions on the topic.

Giant atmospheric waves roll into view
Sunday, 24 May
0900h

Researchers studying the polar atmosphere have recently caught sight of high-flying waves of air that span up to several hundred kilometers, move as fast as as hundreds of kilometers per hour, and transport energy between atmospheric layers with important, but little-understood consequences. Although scientists had previously detected traces of these waves, new observations clearly reveal their motions in three dimensions and may enable researchers soon to trace the waves back to their causes such as specific thunderstorms or winds striking mountains. The comprehensive picture now emerging of the waves should improve atmospheric models used to understand Earth's climate, atmospheric chemistry, and other processes, the wave observers say. Providing these unprecedented portraits of the waves is a new type of radar aided by the aurora. In polar regions, such as Alaska and Canada, the aurora acts like a "flashlight" that illuminates the regions where the waves from the mountains break like ocean waves hitting the shore.

Participants:

Craig Heinselman
AMISR Principal Investigator, SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA,

Michael Nicolls
Research Scientist, SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA;

Sharon Vadas
Research Scientist, Northwest Research Associates, CoRA Division, Boulder, Colorado, USA;

Eric Donovan
Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Sessions: SA73A, SA74A

Completing the Plate Tectonic Revolution: Reconstructing Ancient Continents Using the Large Igneous Province (LIP) Record
Sunday, 24 May
1000h

Preliminary snapshots of ancient Earth are emerging from a project to determine arrangements of Earth's continents as far back as billions of years ago, long before the supercontinent Pangea. With improvements in recovering and analyzing small grains of rare minerals with radioactive clocks, it is possible for the first time for scientists to routinely and precisely age-date short duration, huge volume, volcanic events, known as Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs), and to correlate components of those volcanic 'plumbing systems' across pieces of fragmented continents. In proof-of-concept tests, researchers find that about 2.7 billion to 2.0 billion years ago: eastern Quebec was bordered by Zimbabwe (with rich ore deposits traceable between the two regions), southern Ontario and Quebec were bordered by northern Europe, and northern Quebec and Labrador were linked to southern Greenland. Mining and oil companies are sponsoring the new, 5-year, industry-government-university project with the expectation of a competitive advantage in the search for new resources.