Sediment Experimentalists Update

Dear Gilbert Club,

Thanks for the recent response to our call for those interested in building up the community of laboratory experimentalists.

Now that many of us are getting into the full swing of a new year, we just wanted to send an update and call to the entire group one more time.

Here is a link to a document describing the vision for this organizing effort:
http://tinyurl.com/sed-exp-doc

If you contacted us previously, you are on an email list that will be used for all communications after this one. It was great to hear from you; we had response from a wide range of people:

• an investigator with access to old abandoned flumes
• individuals involved in a range of experiments
• early career scientists who have just set up their own lab
• field experimentalists
• applied mathematicians

We are still soliciting general responses, but here are some of the ideas already shared:

• develop a dialog with major journals on the need to support publication of laboratory methods and datasets
• opinion paper to one of the AGU journals
• concern about the timing of sharing data in order to protect students
• need for quick communication about the unique details of the setup, like speed dating
• collaborate on attempting to replicate each other's work in the other labs
• workshops
• Google spreadsheet for individuals to share details of their data or areas of expertise and contact info

In addition, and to follow-up with many of the initial responses we have developed a brief survey. [Survey]  We hope that you will consider taking a few minutes to answer these questions and help direct our efforts to make them as useful to our community as possible.

You can still join the focused mailing list by responding to any of us.  And thanks in advance for your time.

Cheers,

Leslie Hsu (Lamont-Doherty, lhsu@ldeo.columbia.edu)
Wonsuck Kim (UT Austin, delta@jsg.utexas.edu)
Brandon McElroy (U Wyoming, bmcelroy@uwyo.edu)