Title: Re: paleonet, Call for Sessions Paleontology at EGU
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A number of these comments call for a reply, some are
based on clear misunderstandings.
Be as
it may be, the EGS-AGU-EUG conference was full. Having said
that, I also think that the organizers did a great job of handling the
>11000 participants, but it was by no means perfect.
For one thing, the strict security was due to the Iraq war, not
EGS, and something nobody wishes to have in his conference. Also, the
awful weather cannot be foreseen, the year before it was
gorgeous.
More of
these comments were already received by the EGU council (you don't
want to hear some of those, death threats and all), and we will deal
with those next September. The EGU 2004 will be considerably less
crowded, sessions shortened, and the poster areas will have seats and
more room to walk along. Lecture rooms will be enlarged.
IT IS NOW UP TO US TO HAVE THE SESSIONS WE WANT!!
EUG Strasbourg is DEAD, and we can cry buckets full of
that, but that will not help us out here. EGU will be the only big
Earth Sciences conference in Europe. If we fail to show up, national
policy makers and Science Foundations will consider us dead or dying,
and that will not help us getting the research grants we want.
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!).
True,
Bloated, the organizers were well surprised by the enormous response
(next year AGU will not participate). Nevertheless, the COSIS system
did not collapse, except for the last hour before the deadline when
>5000 people wanted to upload their abstracts. COSIS will be
upgraded to counter these and other problems we met.
Nice
expensive?? compare with EUG at Strasbourg. Flying to Strasbourg is
3-4 times more expensive (you could fly to Nice from Amsterdam two
weeks before for <130euro vv.), and the hotels we stayed in around
the Nice station came between 22 and 50 euro/day, a few of my students
just went and got a room there.
Who is
to blame for the fact that the "old EUG disciplines" have
vanished?
All of us who failed last year to submit session
topics! With the new SSP division we can make a fist (hopefully), and
I need your help to strengthen the SSP division with active
secretaries who help with session topics.
To find
people at Nice, it was difficult. If we have enough sessions next
year, we will try to organize them all in a cluster of rooms close to
each other, so the chances to meet someone will increase. And with a
little better weather the large terrace would be an ideal meeting
point. As for SARS, those subscribing from Hongkong, Japan and China
stayed home, in contrast to the Americans who came in large numbers,
notwithstanding the Iraq war. The nightmare came from the added
security, who forced the registrar outside. And I, having
pre-registered through COSIS, walked through in just a few
minutes.
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.
We wont need to exclude the Paleo, heaven forbid, but I need
topics to defend our disciplines against all those competing ones (for
instance, (paleo)climate stood in for Paleo with a good number of
interesting topics (37 sessions, >1300 abstracts, from 8 sessions
the year before). EGU may be just the place to present it, because all
of geology is there!
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!
Indeed, that is the reason for the call for a raft of session
topics. Be as it may, EUG is dead, and EGU is alive, and we
should at least give it a try!
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.
EGU IS prepared to do just that. But without a good response
(like at GSA!) from us, what can they do??
We will have open Paleontology, Stratigraphy and Sedimentology
sessions. Climate change is the fashion right now, but I doubt that we
can stand another flood of wiggle matches without getting bored. Lets
make Paleo fashionable again!
Jan Smit
--
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Dr. J. Smit
Department of Sedimentology
Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences
Vrije Universiteit
de Boelelaan 1085
1081HV Amsterdam
the Netherlands
tel +3120-4447384
fax +3120-6462457
e-mail: smit@geo.vu.nl
http://www.geo.vu.nl/~smit
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