TOTO

AOGS: A pleasant remembrance

Yun-Tai Chen
AOGS President – 2014 to 2016
Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration

The first time I participated in AOGS meeting was in 2005，in the occasion of the 2nd AOGS Annual Meeting held in Singapore. In the meeting, my co-authors and I presented two research papers on the significant earthquakes which just occurred in Asia. I truly enjoyed the strong academic atmosphere of the meeting and felt that the AOGS meeting is indeed one of the appropriate forums for geoscientists in the Asia-Oceania region. Many of Chinese participants have the views in common with me on AOGS. Since then more and more Chinese geoscientists actively participated the AOGS meeting.

Thanks to the AOGS community who elected me as the president of Solid-Earth section of AOGS. This duty provided me an opportunity to serve for geoscientists of the AOGS community. In the term of 2005 through 2006 I have pleasant collaboration with geoscientists from Asia-Oceania region. We successfully organized Solid-Earth sections in the AOGS annual meeting, and published two volumes of Advances in Earth Sciences, Vols. 1 and 9, to these two volumes I served as volume editor-in-chief.

I recognize that among many advantages of AOGS, the most important one is that it is a non-government, academic organization in nature. This nature greatly enhances its influence to the geoscientists in the Asia-Oceania region and also world-wide, and attracts more and more geoscientists in the Asia-Oceania region to participate the AOGS meetings.

There are always two sides to everything. For example, in preparing the AOGS 2016 Annual Meeting held in Beijing, my Chinese colleagues and I encountered difficulties in organizing an international scientific meeting of more than 2000 participants from various geo-science disciplines. This was because that although there are many non-governmental academic societies related to geo-science in China, but none of them is corresponding to geo-science in whole. As the president of AOGS from 2014 to 2016, I very much appreciate geoscientists of the Chinese National Committee for IUGG, who selflessly undertaken the heavy responsibilities in coordinating and organizing Chinese geoscientists of various academic societies to make the AOGS 2016 Annual Meeting in Beijing successful one. Their tremendous effects greatly helped the successful AOGS 2016 Annual Meeting and promoted the academic exchange among geoscientists within not only China but also other Asia-Oceania region.

Today the AOGS has achieved a great success and has developed stably. I am happy to see that the AOGS annual general assembly becomes one of the choices of the forum for the geoscientists, especially ones in Asia-Oceania region to present their latest research results and exchanging scientific knowledge, and that extensive topics involved and both the fundamental research and its applications are well concerned.

I sincerely hope that in the future the AOGS to keep on its original mission of AOGS, i.e., to promote geosciences and its application for the benefit of humanity; to further intensify scientific exchange and co-operation among multi-disciplines; and to further develop good co-operation with other international geoscience societies and unions. I wish AOGS still better success.