The largest gathering of geophysicists and earth scientists in the world is happening this week in San Francisco at the Fall 2009 American Geophysical Union conference. The conference will be hosting three live webcasts, which you can also view in archive mode.

• Monday, December 14: An Earthquake in an Ancient City: The April 2009 L'Aquila (Central Italy) Seismic Sequence I
• Tuesday, December 15: Geo-Visualization with Virtual Globes II
• Wednesday, December 16: Consequences of an Unusually Long and Deep Solar Minimum I

Jim Gray saw the future of science as an explosion of digital data and a new world of scientific and technological disciplines that would be necessary to make sense of it all. Since his disappearance offshore California in January 2007, Dr. Gray's former colleagues at Microsoft Research have published a volume of essays on eScience in an era of seemingly boundless digital datasets. In the spirit of openness and data sharing, the book itself is available for download on the Microsoft Research website. You can download the entire text or by chapter and essay. Some notable essayists include John Delaney, Professor of Oceanography at the University of Washington and the visionary behind a large, collaborative research effort to establish an underwater observatory offshore Oregon, Washington, and southwest Canada, and Timo Hannay, Publishing Director of Nature.com and co-organiser of Science Foo Camp with Tim O'Reilly.