September 14, 2017, by lzzeb

Goldschmidt 2017 Conference in Paris

A blog by Virginia Panizzo

Between Monday 14th August and Friday 18^th August I attended the Goldschmidt 2017 conference in Paris, hosted by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society. It had been a few years since my last attendance (Sacramento, 2014) so I was rather excited to get together with old colleagues and friends. This year’s conference had more than 4,000 delegates, the largest Geochemistry get together to date!

Although the only delegate to attend from the School of Geography, there were a number of colleagues from the Centre for Environmental Geochemistry group at BGS. The conference gave me the opportunity to present some of my research outputs from Malaysia, during Anne McLaren Fellowship. Although still in the preliminary interpretive stages, it was the ideal chance for me to speak to old colleagues from Belgium with particular expertise in river and estuarine silicon isotope geochemistry. With what turns out to be a very challenging data set, this was very welcomed and I hope to take advantage of these collaborations during the publication of the work.

I was also able to get together with Dr. Patrick Frings, now based at GFZ Potsdam. While we were at Goldschmidt we received the good news that our research permit was granted, to conduct fieldwork in spring 2018 at the Maliau Basin, Sabah, Malaysia. We were able to get our heads together over the course of the week to best discuss fieldwork logistics and longer term research activities.

Although my paper, “Seasonal variations in silicon concentrations and δ³⁰Si signatures at a tropical estuary: Matang, Malaysia”, was presented in the afternoon of the last day, I was lucky enough to receive some good feedback and considerations with regards to the data set. All of which was much appreciated! Over the course of the week, I attended a great number of sessions on the application of existing and novel stable isotope approaches in the natural environment as well as recent, significant advances in analytical stable isotope methods.

As was expected, a great Goldschmidt conference was had. Until the next, Boston, 2018.

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