This article is part of a series of articles from 3 EAG ambassadors who attended ICP13 (International Conference on Paleoceanography). You can go back to read the introduction here.

This Sydney meeting was my third ICP attendance. The first time I attended, it was 6 years ago in Sitges, Spain and I was a shy, fresh PhD student. I remember feeling a bit intimidated by the crowd and the way everyone seemed to know each other. In Sydney I now realized how many friends I already made in this network which made me feel much more comfortable. It was also nice to observe  how extensive my research interests had become and how they had evolved during these last 6 years. It was again a great pleasure to meet the paleo-researchers in person who I only knew through publications and social media.

The meeting was sometimes slightly overwhelming with the help of jetlag. There were many nice talks mostly early during the day and so many interesting posters with such limited time. One disappointing thing about ICP13 for me was the poster presentation setup. Traditional structure of ICP13 allows posters to stand for the whole week, whereas in this venue this was not possible which limited the interaction. Nevertheless, I personally somehow managed to have nice and interesting discussions in front of some posters as well as my own where I presented my data on SST reconstruction using relatively new proxy. As expected I learned new things and got insight of different aspects of this interesting research area.

One of the highlights of the ICP13 was the conference dinner which was held on a boat with an amazing view of Sydney; the opera house, the bridge, the whole city. And following this impressive evening on Thursday we had the paleomusicology concert, which is my favorite social event. I can neither play an instrument nor sing, maybe that is the reason I do not get as nervous as those who go on stage and I really enjoy watching and listening to my colleagues and friends.

This time, I couldn’t attend any of the field trips organized by the conference organizers. But I was able to do the Bondi-Coogee Beach walk – highly recommended if you visit Sydney; fish & chips at Manly watching the surfers – a nice ferry ride from next to Sydney opera house and a day hiking trip to Blue Mountains – be prepared for steps! This was my first time in Australia and I really enjoyed it. I am really grateful to EAG for making it possible for me to attend my favorite conference for the third time. Hopefully I will make it to the next ones. Spoiler alert! It will be in Norway.

Zeynep Erdem: I am a postdoctoral researcher working with marine sediment records & biogeochemical proxy applications with particular focus on the last glacial – interglacial transition. I am a geologist from Istanbul, Turkey. I completed my PhD in Kiel, Germany in 2016. During my PhD, I worked with benthic foraminifera from sediment cores from offshore Peru. It was part of a large-scale project which was a collaborative research with GEOMAR and University of Kiel. Afterwards, I moved to Royal NIOZ, the Netherlands where I found the opportunity to learn organic geochemistry approaches in paleoceanography. For the last three years, I have been working with lipid biomarkers at sediment samples from different oxygen minimum environments like Peru. Currently, I am looking for new research possibilities, which is why attending ICP13 played an important role for networking, meeting friends & new people as well as seeing the active research topics and ideas.