I just returned home from The Tropics Rule conference up at LDEO, celebrating Mark Cane’s contributions to climatology and highlighting some of the best and most recent work in various areas of tropical climatology, including modeling, dynamics and paleoclimate.It was a great conference, and very intense, like a very concentrated AGU with only the best talks by the brightest minds in the field. The collection of talent and intelligence and knowledge and brain power in that one conference room was impressive. They also let me in.

These luminaries of the field were all connected to Mark Cane in one way or another – from his student Steven Zebiak (of the Zebiak-Cane model of ENSO) to Amy Clement (of the Ocean Dynamical Thermostat) to George Philander (who had an interesting take on the forcing of Ice Ages, and how transition states may be involved).  Julien Emilie-Geay (formerly of LDEO, collaborated with MC) spoke on Holocene dynamics, and Christina Karamperidou (MC was one of her advisors) talked about ENSO variability (side note: she was one of the first speaker at the GEOS series!). Tom Koutavas (my advisor) spoke about the Holocene, and about our approach using single forams. I got to see my data (and indeed, my actual graphics!) on the big screen, which was fantastic.