Everyone working in academic geoscience, especially in Europe, has the EGU week highlighted in their calendar. Even if not everyone has the luxury to travel to Vienna each year, we all have at least one colleague who is planning to present new work, new results, or new ideas at EGU. When the abstract submission deadline approaches we all feel involved, either directly or indirectly.

When we received the reminder about the upcoming deadline for session proposals in July 2019, it felt quite natural to try to organize a session to celebrate the last EGU of the SLATE project. No session focused specifically on submarine mass movements during EGU 2019, and the SLATE ESRs were scattered all over different sessions. For our last year, we wanted to organize something that could put all the SLATE ESRs and the submarine mass movements community together to present their work. We gathered five SLATE ESRs who were willing to contribute actively to the session’s organization, and with this motivation in mind, we started working on it.

First thing: you have to make sure that nobody else is organizing the same session. In our case, this meant getting in touch with the S4SLIDE community, which gathers many other researchers working on the topic of submarine mass movements. It took only one email to Lorena Moscardelli, the S4SLIDE chair, to get her full support for the initiative, including five travel grants for early career scientists to attend our session. We could not have had a better or more motivating start.

Everything from there on felt quite spontaneous: shape the session in a way that everyone working in the field could be involved, find a catchy session name, write the proposal, submit it. The session got accepted. We promoted it on our Twitter page (@itnSLATE ), making sure to be annoying enough that everyone working on submarine landslides knew about it. Eventually we received enough abstracts to have an oral and a poster session. Session time: late afternoon on Friday… Not ideal. Some hard negotiation with other conveners and the organizers later, the new session time: Monday afternoon. We could not have asked for a better outcome.

Then, the unexpected happened. Since everyone realized the COVID-19 pandemic was a serious threat, it was clear that it would somehow affect the conference week in Vienna. This bad feeling was confirmed by the end of March: “No EGU General Assembly in 2020, see you in 2021. BUT…we will try something different. This year, the EGU will be an online event, free and open to everyone”.

Honestly, the initial expectations were not so high, but as new details about the online conference were revealed, the enthusiasm started to increase. By mid April, it was clear that we were going to be pioneers of something that could represent a big innovation not only for EGU, but for the entire geoscience community: a virtual conference where thousands of people could talk about science. A drastic reduction in carbon emissions and no more worring about travel budgets. A potential opportunity to reach a larger number of scientists, and a chance to share our presentations beyond the geo-nerds who attend EGU in-person. In other words, there was potential for a scientific communication and outreach revolution.

We needed to make sure that the authors in our session were as motivated as we were. We got in touch with them and explained the importance of being part of such an exciting experiment. In the end, 12 out of the 20 original presenters uploaded their presentation materials (“displays”), and discussed their research on a live chat with more than 120 attendees. The level of engagement was unexpected: a two hour long active discussion, a multitude of specific and open questions, debates. Everyone could notice a considerably more dynamic environment than a regular oral session.