The EGU General Assembly is a prominent annual event that brings together geoscientists from all over the world into one meeting covering all disciplines of Earth, planetary and space sciences. This year, the meeting was a great success with 4780 oral, 8489 poster, and 705 PICO presentations as well as 11837 scientists attending from 108 countries. He is one of the twelve staff members of IGGCAS, who went to Vienna from 11th to 18th, April to attending this year’s EGU meeting. ‘It is an exciting meeting with lots of valuable, interesting talks and posters and nearly every meeting room was full of participators’, commented Prof. Aimin Du, who was one of the IGGCAS attendees.
A key subject of this year’s EGU meeting was “A voyage through scales”. Earth’s spatial and temporal scales represent extraordinary variability and extend from milliseconds to billions of years, and from nanometers to the size of planets and larger. Such broad ranges give rise to a variety of complex challenges that geoscientists all over the world must tackle to be able to measure and comprehend the natural world.
Prof. Du’s primary interest at the meeting were the sessions on the magnetosphere, in which one talk, presented by Dr. Robert Lysak, was about Alfvén waves and aurora. Aurora are the most compelling visual evidence of plasma processes in the magnetosphere of Earth as well as the other planets with a magnetic field. Over 40 years of research have indicated that auroras are a consequence of the acceleration of charged particles toward the neutral atmosphere. The parallel electric fields are important for accelerating the charged particles. How the parallel electric fields are generated is still an open question. This talk highlighted the importance of Alfvén waves in generating the parallel electric fields to accelerate the charged particles. Twelve speakers from IGGCAS is a small number among all the participants, but we hope our Institute’s presentations will leave a deep impression on other attendees at the EGU meeting.
Voyaging through the scale of Earth, EGU 2015
