Front Range Report, Abstracts

The second regional conference of the Front Range Branch, AGU, was attended by more than 80 professionals and some 20 outstanding high school students. The conference included 2 days of interdisciplinary talks, and lots of discussion, that primarily were keyed to geophysical studies of Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Other talks reported on nonregional, and sometimes global, studies being done by geophypsicists of the Front Range region. Topics included tectonics of the Front Range and the Colorado Plateau, pollution of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, and a supreme polluting event that caused the late-Cretaceous extinctions. Other notable talks were on toxic cleanup, microburst (wind shear) detection at U.S. airports, and other meteorological studies. Several talks treated the audience to the excitement of new work and surprise discoveries. The meeting was multimedia, including the playing of two videos through a projection TV and the playing of a fascinating tape between an airport control tower and incoming pilots during a severe microburst event.