On the evening of Sunday 6th April the baggage reclaim at Nice airport is full of people with tubes a metre or so long slung over their shoulders. They bring their tubes in from the gates alone or with a friend; soon they recognise others of their ilk and congregate collegially before the arrival of checked-in bags spurs them to break off in taxi-sized cliques and head off into the night.
The tube-bearers are coming to what is probably the largest meeting of Earth scientists ever to take place in Europe – a joint meeting of the European Union of Geosciences, the European Geophysical Society and the American Geophysical Union. The posters wrapped up in their tubes carry the results and hypotheses that they will be presenting to their peers. When the occasional poster tube turns up on the baggage carousel, there’s a mild susurration of shock at the nonchalance of checking in a poster; lose your poster and you lose your presentation.
Monday morning
In the Apollon theatre, a vast auditorium at one end of Nice’s Acropolis congress centre, Jan Smit of Vrije University in Amsterdam is talking about the Chicxulub crater in Mexico – the site of the asteroid impact 65m years ago that seems to have killed off the dinosaurs. Smit is part of an international team that recently drilled a borehole into the rocks of the crater, and this is one of the first presentations of their results. Unfortunately, most of the people who might want to hear him are stuck in a long queue outside the centre waiting to pick up their badges and get through security.
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