Like so many other events and conferences, the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union EGU will not take place in the usual manner this year due to the corona pandemic. In "normal" years, around 16,000 scientists from all over the world and from all disciplines of the geosciences take part in the meeting. This year, the meeting will be held virtually. From 3 to 8 May, the period in which the meeting would have taken place in Vienna, Austria, various online activities are planned to enable scientific exchange.

This year, EGU honours Karina Wilgan with the Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award. She is working in GFZ section Space Geodetic Techniques in a joint project of GFZ and Technical University of Berlin. Wilgan receives the award for the development of new methods for the integration of GNSS delays ('GNSS' stands for Global Navigation Satellite System, which includes for example the American satellite navigation system GPS or European Galileo system), meteorological observations, and numerical weather prediction models for applications in InSAR and GNSS. Karina Wilgan has been a postdoctoral fellow at GFZ and TU Berlin since January 2020, her project is funded by the German Research Foundation DFG.

With Mengdi Pan a young scientist from GFZ section Inorganic and Isotope Geochemistry is also awarded. Pan receives the Outstanding Student Poster and PICO Award of the Energy, Resources, and the Environment Division for her poster presentation at the EGU annual meeting 2019, entitled "Changes of Permeability as a Result of Hydrate Dissociation in Sand-Clay Sediment from Qilian Mountain Permafrost, China". Mengdi Pan has been a PhD student at the GFZ since 2017 and is funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (ak)

More information:

• Award Mangdi Pan 
• Award Karina Wilgan 
• Website EGU General Assembly 2020
• EGU website with information on the General Assembly
• Hashtag to share information in social media: #shareEGU20