Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences
Patricia Kaiser
Report of GLOMAR PhD student Patricia Kaiser about her participation in the Ocean sciences Meeting 2020 in San Diego, USA from 16 to 21 February 2020
The Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM) 2020 took place from the 16th to 21st of February at the Convention Center in in San Diego, USA. With more than 6300 attendees, of which 32% were students, from 66 countries, the OSM is one of the largest international conferences in marine sciences. During the six-day meeting over 3200 poster and 1800 talks were presented, covering a wide range of different interdisciplinary marine topics, from polar regions to the tropics, from physical to biological oceanography and from microbes to whales. Besides this huge selection of sessions, the OSM further offered several plenary talks, various events (e.g. jam session, 5K run, ...), workshops and field trips as well as so called Town Halls (meetings lead by government agencies, representatives of academic programs or other scientific projects to gather input from a broad marine science community). New to me was also the concept of eLightning sessions, which were a combination of poster and oral presentations. Participants who got selected to present their research in this way prepared an ePoster which they then had the chance to present in 3 minutes during the session in the eLightning Theater. Afterwards they could be approached for questions in front of their ePoster, which was shown on a touchscreen. The amount of things to do was sometimes a bit overwhelming, with so many activities happening at the same time, that it was hard to decide which event to attend. Nevertheless, everything was well organized and with the help of an app (AGU Events) it was quite easy to get an overview and to create your own timetable for each day.
On Thursday it was my turn to present my talk ‘Turning up the Heat – Implications of Rising Temperatures for Arctic Zooplankton’ in the session ‘Effects of Warming on Biological, Ecological, and Biogeochemical Ocean Processes: Responses from Organismal to Ecosystem Scales’. This was the first time for me at such a big international conference. Nevertheless, the session hosts and audience were very welcoming and made it easy to feel comfortable on stage.
Finally, it was a great experience to attend an international conference of such extend. I learned many new advances in various scientific fields and met many old and new faces. I am grateful to the University of Bremen and GLOMAR for making my participation possible by funding my trip to the Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Diego.
