A scientific journey to Singapore for AOGS 2025

This post is written by Liqiang Xu, Associate Professor at Hefei University of Technology and Academic Editor for PLOS Climate

I attended the 22^nd Annual Meeting of the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS) at Singapore at the end of July. The meeting was held at the Sands Expo & Convention Centre, Marina Bay Sands Singapore. The AOGS annual meeting provides an excellent communication platform for scientists from Asia and Oceania. Themes of the meeting this year covered almost every aspect of Earth Sciences, including Atmospheric Science, Biogeosciences, Hydrology, Ocean Sciences, and Solid Earth Science. It also covered themes in Planetary Science, Solar & Terrestrial Science, and Interdisciplinary Geoscience. Recently, my group finished a research project investigating continental weathering using magnesium isotopes. Our study concerns processes at the interfaces of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. I shared the work in a session under the theme of Interdisciplinary Geoscience.

Many of the talks and posters presented at the meeting were related to different aspects of climate science. One of the talks that most impressed me was a study of long-lived bivalve shells by a research group from the University of Tokyo. I study reef islands in the ocean, and once collected many sea shells for my work. Such shells are natural archives for reconstructing past climates to a high resolution. What I knew is that the life span of these shells could be as long as decades, or perhaps even a century. I was very interested to learn for the first time from the talk at AOGS that a shell could be as old as 174 years!