Title: Re: paleonet Paleonet, Call for Session topics Paleontology at EGU 2004 Nice
on 03-04-17 09.33, Jan Smit at j2.smit@mdw.vu.nl wrote:
Dear All,
As new president of the division Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Paleontology (SSP) of the EGU,European Geosciences Union, I send herewith a call for (Paleontological) Session topics/subjects + convenor names for the 1st EGU General Assembly Nice, France, 25 - 30 April 2004 .
Those of you who have been at the EGS-AGU-EUG assembly last 7-11 April, have probably also noticed that among the many (Paleo)climate wiggles, Geophysical modelling and biogeology, our traditional disciplines that formed the core or EUG were fairly underrepresented.
Does this mean that our " classical" disciplines are doomed, or can we make a comeback at the 2004 meeting?
Having just come back from an unhappy experience at EBS-AGU-EUG, I'd like to make a couple of comments on this conference.
The new-style conference is horribly bloated, with a programme weighing in like a good-size telephone directory (the abstracts had to come on CD). Furthermore, Nice is very expensive. The new agglomeration has enormously diluted the already highly attenuated historical geology /palaeo content of the old EUG. In fact, given the vast size of the conference, the number of sessions directly appealing to these disciplines was vanishingly - almost absurdly - small. As usual, the conference was so big it was impossible to find anyone from your own discipline to talk to. As value for grant money, it failed on all fronts. It was also not particularly well organised or thought-out, with, for example, few places to sit and talk to people (the essential component to any conference, in my view); and registration was a nightmare (if anyone is going to catch SARS, it will be in a setting like that!).
General geo conferences do not need to exclude palaeo - a good example being GSA, which has a very healthy and usually innovative set of palaeo sessions. But with little tradition to build on, the EGS-etc convention is going to struggle to attract more palaeo. In other words, the problem is not that palaeo is dying, but that EUG-etc is (presently) not the place to present it.
I should also say that EUG is itself partly to blame for the state of play. The way to get palaeo properly represented at such a conference is to build up an attractive "slate" of sessions, to make it worth going to - even one good session is not going to do the job at all. But the last time I was involved in attempting to organise a session at EUG, and there was an attempt to present such a co-ordinated raft of sessions, the grand powers that organise the whole conference threw some of it out (despite initial encouragement to the contrary). As a result, we decided to let our session lapse as well - the effort was simply not worth the no doubt paltry results that would be obtained. I don't feel happy about asking people to go to an expensive conference to sit through about 6 talks for one half of an afternoon!
If EUG is serious about getting good palaeo into its conference, then it must be prepared to support a quantum shift in its programme in that direction, and not just rely on a few die-hards organising islands of palaeo in oceans of geochemistry and climate change. The way things stand now, I seriously doubt that is a possibility.
Graham
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Graham E. Budd
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Research Fellow
Department of Earth Sciences
Palaeobiology
Norbyvägen 22
University of Uppsala
Uppsala
Sweden
SE-752 36
graham.budd@pal.uu.se
Tel: + 46 18 471 27 62
FAX: + 46 18 471 27 49
http://www.palaeontology.geo.uu.se
The Palaeobiology program was formed on 1st January 2003 by amalgamation
of Historical Geology & Palaeontology and part of Quaternary
Geology. The program carries out research and teaching involving the history and evolution of life from its origin to the present day.