Ancient and modern, rock and fluid meet in san francisco

With 6000 attendees and 4700 presentations, the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco last month was the biggest yet. And that made room for even more diversity than usual. Only the AGU could accommodate news of asteroid impacts and extinctions one-third of a billion years ago and a progress report on the first direct measurements of centimeter-scale ocean mixing, an ongoing study in the Atlantic.