Yeosu

So the second international conference on climate change effects in marine ecosystems is officially a wrap...

The conference was held on the site of the World Expo.  I did my part to spread goodwill.

The conference gave me the chance to hang out with people who are interested in exactly the same kinds of questions that my research tries to answer.  A highlight for me was a talk by a biologist working in the Baltic Sea who used an approach that a colleague and I developed in the Gulf of Alaska.  It was a great example of how scientific communication is supposed to work - someone I had never met read our paper and thought of ways that our research might be applicable in an ecosystem I've never been to, and then I happened by chance to be at a conference where he was presenting his results.

An unlooked-for bonus of hanging out in a new country with a bunch of scientists is that they tend to be really good travelling companions.  It was a pretty worldly group - people from six continents, most of whom have travelled widely.  A good bunch to go out to a Korean restaurant with.

Of course, scientists are also prone to occasional over-exuberance...