Here we are! After several years of hiatus, the Goldschmidt “in person” has returned to the old continent. We are very happy to see each other in person and not in a zoom meeting 🤢! It seems that the Barcelona 2019 conference, the last one I attended in person, was a geological era ago, but here we are, enjoying talks in person once again!

This first day I was lucky to attend the fantastic talks and posters in session 13a “Mechanistic links between (bio)mineral formation, environmental conditions, and proxy systems”. In this session I saw amazing presentations on how minerals make up the skeletons of all kinds of animals and how these skeletons can later be used by Earth Scientists to study how our planet was like thousands, millions of years ago (The so called geochemical proxies). There have been talks on how these minerals form, what challenges they present in terms of being studied as geochemical proxies and what risks climate change poses to the formation of these minerals. The level has been excellent and, as you can see, the room was already small from the very first talk. Good start for the Goldschmidt!