We hope that you are doing well in these difficult times. In an effort to ensure the health and safety of our community, we want to let you all know that the 2021 West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Workshop will not be an in-person meeting this fall. Instead, we are planning to have community-oriented discussions on 6-7 October 2020 focused on addressing racial diversity and inclusion and supporting early-career researchers (ECRs) in the WAIS community. 

One of the defining aspects of WAIS Workshops is the encouragement of interdisciplinary scientific exchanges across career levels, and we want to make sure that there are still forums for such fruitful, engaging discourse among our West Antarctic research community in spite of COVID-19. To retain a semblance of that unique environment, the WAIS Workshop Organizers are planning to facilitate  a series of distributed science sessions for interested community members that will begin before October. These sessions will meet virtually every few weeks as small groups (<15 people) for a series of short research talks (5-10 minutes) followed by WAIS-style discussion. The groups will be shuffled between sessions to promote diverse viewpoints on our scientific questions.

These WAIS activities that are in lieu of an in-person workshop will be at no cost to participants. We plan to provide details on the activities by the end of July. 

In the meantime, however, please reach out to your ECR mentee/mentor that you were paired with at the 2019 WAIS Workshop. If you are new to the WAIS community and/or would like to now participate as an ECR mentee (defined here as undergraduate to ≤10 years from PhD) or as a non-ECR mentor, please contact Lauren Simkins (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). 

Sincerely, 

The WAIS Organizing Committee