Hydrate-Sediment-Fluid Interactions at Pore to Regional Scale

2010 will mark the inauguration of the Gordon Research Conference on Natural Gas Hydrates, to be held at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. The Conference will be the first to bring together academic, government, and industry researchers at all career stages and from both within and outside the gas hydrates community at a retreat-like meeting specifically organized to encourage intensive discussion of unpublished, state-of-the-art advances in gas hydrates and allied disciplines. The Conference will feature presentations on cutting-edge field, laboratory, and numerical modeling studies that enhance understanding of the interaction among sediment, hydrate, gas, pore fluids, and microbes at all spatial scales and at critical temporal scales for both marine and permafrost gas hydrate systems. The key goal of this meeting is to elucidate emerging concepts about geologic, microbiological, petrophysical, and hydrologic controls on natural gas hydrate systems without specifying a focus on a single field expedition or setting. Invited speakers and discussion leaders include geoscientists, microbiologists, physicists, and chemists, as well as petroleum, geotechnical, and chemical engineers. All participants have the opportunity to contribute a poster to the Conference. Poster sessions, long-format formal talks and discussion sessions, and informal activities are scheduled throughout the Conference week, with no concurrent sessions. The application deadline is May 16, 2010, and partial funding for registration costs may be available to some participants. An announcement about the Conference was published in the summer 2009 edition of "Fire in the Ice".