Spot the odd one out, and meet me below the fold:
- Tilt-Depth Method: A Simple Depth Estimation Method using First Order Magnetic Derivatives.
- The Use of Multi-Level Potential Field Data in Regional, Geophysical Modelling
- Satellite Gravity and Geoid Studies Reveal the Formations Underlying Large-Scale Basin Structures
- 3D Gravity Modeling in Deepwater Gulf of Mexico
- Mapping and Delineating Prospective Geology with FTG Gravity Data
- Integrated Seismic Structure, Stratigraphy & Magnetic Basement Interpretation: Offshore Louisiana Shelf
- Gabon Regional Structural Framework, Derived from Gravity
- A Palaeomagnetic Investigation of the Neoarchean Pongola Supergroup, South Africa
These were the posters in the “Advances in Gravity and Magnetics” session at AAPG on Wednesday afternoon. I don’t think that it’s too hard to spot that in comparison to the others, the last one – mine – is a little… esoteric. The “Magnetics” in the session title really refers to methods for turning maps like this into a picture of subsurface structure, rather than reconstructing tectonic histories.
This wasn’t the original plan when I signed up for this conference. Back in January, my supervisor here was invited to give a talk about the 3 billion year-old sequence that I’ve been studying at the session that I attended on Monday afternoon. He devolved the invitation to me, so I submitted an abstract, which was accepted. I thought this meant that I was giving a talk at the aforementioned session, so you can imagine my confusion a couple of months ago when I checked out my abstract on the AAPG website, and discovered I’d been shunted to a poster session instead. I feared that my work might be a hard sell to the people wandering past, as they were unlikely to have a professional interest in the vagaries of Archean tectonics (quite understandably, before someone takes that the wrong way).
To add to my concerns, I was faced with a little dilemma when I set up my poster: the booth they provided for it was huge. My ‘little’ A0 poster suddenly seemed quite insignificant.
The fact that it would have been pretty expensive – and time consuming – to fill up a booth this side was no real comfort when I saw some of my compatriots across the aisle doing just that. At this stage, I was starting to wonder if the next two hours were going to consist of me looking hopefully at people as they peered in, crinkled their brow in confusion – first as they tried to locate my poster in all that blank space, and then as they read the title – and moved on.
Fortunately, it wasn’t quite that bad – I’m not going to claim I was mobbed with interested parties, but a reasonable number of people were willing to chat with me for a few minutes. For the most part, these discussions were in the same vein as my talk at the University of Cape Town last Friday, being more like paleomagnetic outreach than a detailed discussion of my data (I wish that I’d thought to fill some of the empty space with a ‘paleomagnetism for beginners’ sub-panel), but it was a much better experience than I feared. In fact, if I think about it, I probably talked to more people that when I presented a poster at AGU a few years ago, although that might have had something to do with most of that session arguing with a Kiwi geologist who was not so keen on the tectonic implications of my PhD research. Perhaps there is something to be said for your audience being limited to interested non-experts…
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