In the last decade the General Assembly of the European Geoscience Union has been developed steadily both in terms of the number of participants and the quality of sciences, as Dr. Xiaoping Yang commented after returning home from Vienna. He is one of the five staff members of IGGCAS, who went to Vienna in late April to have participated in this year’s EGU. While the International Section of the IGGCAS asked him about his opinion on the Congress, ‘A great event with many interesting talks and posters, a very busy meeting’ was his overall impression.  

For the first time in the EGU’s history, a conference theme was affiliated to the general assembly in 2014 and it was ‘The Face of the Earth: Forms and Processes’. The conference was also dedicated to remember the centenary of Edward Suess’ death. Suess was a great Austrian geomorphologist who is known particularly for his research on mountain-building of the Alps.  

Although the congress took place in the mid-European town of Austria, the topics of presentations cover all parts of the world. As Dr. Yang mentioned, he was mostly impressed by the high quality of two specific sessions about climate and landscape changes, i.e., ‘The Quaternary History of the River Nile’ and ‘Landforms and Geodiversity’. Five speakers from the IGGCAS can definitely not make a large number among the 4,829 oral, 9,583 poster and 483 PICO presentations presented in this year’s EGU, but we do hope that the depths of our Institute’s research presented at the conference would be positively remembered.    

The Face of the Earth, The Legacy of Eduard Suess, EGU 2014