The Salamanca workshop was hosted at the University of Salmanca by María Angeles Bárcena. Forty six participants arrived from Australia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Russia, Spain, UK and the USA with 28 participants from Europe and 18 from the rest of the world. Fourteen microscope sessions were presented, with 11 talks and 20 posters on topics as diverse as “Denticulopsis praedimorpha and Thalassionema umitakae; a comparison of two marine planktonic diatoms with complex and simple valve structures”, presented by Fumio Akiba (Japan), to “Dominance of diatoms in the guts of copepods from the Southern Ocean” presented by Aurélie Guillou (Australia/France). Nine presentations were offered on northern polar regions and 26 from southern polar regions, with further presentations on taxonomy, transfer functions, frustule geochemistry and chronology.
The workshop icebreaker was held in the beautiful cloister of the Palace Colegio Fonseca, with the workshop dinner held in the Hotel San Polo – a unique setting in the ruins of the ancient church of San Polo, at the former wall of the city of Salamanca. A workshop field trip was arranged to the Sierra de Francia. Geologically, the sediments from this region date from the Cambrian to Ordovician. We saw amazing trilobite trails in rocks built into the walls of houses in the village of Monsagro, and also took in the traditional culture of the region, visiting the Peña de Francia monastery and also a vineyard – a tour of the fields as well as tasting!!
The workshop received sponsorship from The University of Salamanca, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) programmes Past Antarctic Ice Sheet Dynamics (PAIS) and Antarctic Thresholds - Ecosystem Resilience and Adaptation (AnT-ERA), the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), the Palaeontological Association, The Micropalaeontological Society and Beta Analytic.
