Dear conveners, presenters, and participants of vEGU21,

The start of the vPICO sessions on Monday morning did not go well. Many small problems with the BBB-based chats quickly escalated to major connection issues in the first time block, and we had to switch over to Zoom in a very short time span. Unfortunately, this raised further issues, including Zoom-bombing, in some of the later sessions.

Numerous conveners stepped up to the challenge, and we saw several creative responses to the situation. We would like to thank you, our community, for your responsiveness and positive attitude throughout this difficult day.

All vEGU21 events from Tuesday, April 27 on will take place as scheduled. All vPICO sessions will be hosted on Zoom. In order to alleviate traffic in the conference website, the livestream and text-chats will be disabled. However, all participants will be able to discuss and share in the Zoom sessions, where one breakout room per presentation will allow in-depth discussions. Text-chat based discussion will also be available on the Zoom platform, and the handshake tool will allow one-on-one text-chats.

We sincerely apologise to all conference participants for the difficulties of this Monday. The conveners, chairpersons, and speakers whose sessions were significantly impacted will be contacted in May to discuss possible forms of compensation. Please continue to check https://www.egu21.eu/ or follow @EuroGeosciences for the latest updates.

Peter van der Beek, EGU Programme Committee Chair
Helen Glaves, EGU President
Alberto Montanari, EGU Vice-President