Absolutely final meeting + IGCP 735 successor project!

Hello IGCP 653 member,

We hope that you are all in good health during this difficult period, which has now been with us for over a year.

As you know, IGCP 653 was scheduled from 2016 and 2020. For the final year, 2020, several meetings were planned, but all were cancelled because of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the official closing congress was organized in Copenhagen, Denmark, although the meeting was entirely virtual.

AD 2021 was supposed to be ‘on extended term’ (OET, without finance from the UNESCO), with an ‘absolutely final meeting’ in Lille, France, and several other events (see our website). With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, it is now also uncertain if we will be able to organise any meeting in 2021 with the physical presence of IGCP 653 participants.

The Lille meeting was scheduled for September 10th – 20th, 2021, with a pre-congress field excursion to Belgium and France (September 10th-12th), indoor sessions (September 13th-15th), and a post-congress field excursion to Wales and the Welsh Borderlands, UK (September 16th-20th). The excursions will most probably be postponed (in the next few months), but the indoor sessions will occur, but possibly also mostly as a virtual meeting. Please, keep these dates in your diaries, because we will definitely organise at least a virtual congress, that will allow all of you to present your (final) results of the project IGCP 653.

Very soon, we will inform you about the context of the congress, with deadlines, and details for abstract submission, etc. Registration for the online meeting is free, and we hope to be able to organize a congress that will be as successful as the virtual Copenhagen meeting in September 2020.

The project IGCP 653 is thus ‘virtually’ over! However, we are very happy to announce that a ‘successor project’ has just been accepted by UNESCO.

The new IGCP  project on the Ordovician, entitled ‘Rocks and the Rise of Ordovician Life’ (‘Rocks n’ROL’) was submitted last October (https://rocksnrol.wordpress.com/). The eight co-leaders (Bertrand LEFEBVRE, France; Yves CANDELA, UK; Khadija EL HARIRI, Morocco; Mansoureh GHOBADIPOUR, Iran; Elena RAEVSKAYA, Russia; Oive TINN, Estonia; Beatriz WAISFELD, Argentina; Wenhui WANG, China) are delighted to inform you that this new IGCP  has been officially accepted by the IGCP board at UNESCO, and it will run from 2021 to 2025 (https://en.unesco.org/news/18-new-projects-join-international-geoscience-programme-2021).

The new project number is 735, so after several previous International Geoscience Projects dedicated to the Ordovician (n°410, n°503, n°653) Ordovician research now continues in the frame of the new project IGCP n°735 Rocks n’ROL!

The official opening meeting of the new 5-year project IGCP 735 will be organized together with the absolutely final meeting of IGCP 653 in September 2021. This will enable a smooth transition between the two projects.

Therefore, please, note in your agenda the closing meeting of IGCP 653 that will serve also as the opening meeting of IGCP 735: September 13th-15th, 2021!

Looking forward to meeting you soon at conferences, virtual meetings, workshops or in the field,

Thomas Servais and the co-leaders of IGCP 653

Bertrand Lefebvre and the co-leaders of IGCP 735

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