From the moment the meeting began, AGU 2025 in New Orleans underscored the scale and momentum of the Earth science community, bringing together over 20,000 attendees from across disciplines to share ideas, methods, and emerging directions.
One session that particularly stood out was “From Earth Processes to Deposits: Geoscience Perspectives on Critical Minerals,” which focused on critical minerals. Within that session was a talk exploring how advances in artificial intelligence can be used to improve mineral exploration by explicitly accounting for geological uncertainty. The speaker of that talk, David Zhen Yin from Stanford University, described how the same underlying technology once used to bring Davy Jones’ tentacled face to life on screen in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies can be repurposed to model the probabilistic occurrence of desired minerals within complex geologic deposits.
I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to give an oral presentation of my research in the session “Bridging Scales to Advance Ocean-Based Carbon Dioxide Removal.” The discussion that followed was especially valuable, with several thoughtful and constructive questions that I have since been able to incorporate into the post-computational analysis of the work. Beyond the formal Q&A, the chance to connect with attendees—many of whom had produced the foundational research that my own work builds upon—was a particularly rewarding experience and highlighted the collaborative nature of the AGU community.
Overall, AGU 2025 was a valuable opportunity to both share my own work and gain fresh perspectives that will continue to inform my research going forward. I would encourage all undergraduates to attend AGU, as the sheer scale and diversity of the work on display inevitably opens new avenues of interest and curiosity.
