INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIA, CONFERENCES AND FIELD MEETINGS

WOGOGOB 2001

“Wobblygob” to some of us, or more correctly – the Working Group on the Ordovician Geology of Baltoscandia, was originally, a forum primarily for Ordovician workers from Norway, Sweden and Denmark, but has since been enlarged to accommodate colleagues from the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Poland and Russia. In May 2001, the meeting was hosted by the Geological Museum, University of Copenhagen, and well organised by David Harper and Svend Stouge from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) together with their colleagues. If my memory serves me correctly, this was the sixth official meeting although I remember the initial meeting in 1988 (making the number seven) which somehow does not count. I understand that the organizers had more than their share of anguish when arranging this meeting with a series of no-shows. None the less, things sorted themselves out and I believe David Harper is now preparing to organise the Palaeontological Association meeting at Christmas 2001, so do come. There is nothing like “Wonderful Copenhagen” and the Danes have a great knack of producing delicious food and wonderful beer (with aid from the Carlsberg Foundation) at all times of the day. The auditorium at the Geological Museum has been recently decorated, the pine floors varnished and there is an air of the grand old days in the walls and around the bar top covering the rotunda. The museum staff and research students did all they could to make us feel at home and the dinner upstairs with live music from the Irish-Western group of Svend Stouge, Jan Audun Rasmussen and Claus Sten made for a lively evening.

There were two days of lectures (May 17-18) followed by an excursion to Scania, led by Kent Larsen from Lund University. Unfortunately I could not take part in this but I understand it was a huge success and participants had the experience of crossing the new Øresund road-rail bridge which now joins Denmark and Sweden. The formal lectures, 27 in all, covered the themes of Biodiversity, Palaeontology and Stratigraphy, Geochemistry, Palaeoenvironments and Faunal Dynamics and Geodynamics and Sequence Stratigraphy and there was an impressive poster session. Lectures were generally of high standard but often represented a reinterpretation of older palaeontological and stratigraphical data presented in a new quantitative way. This is a welcome trend but I hope we shall not see this become a substitute for the still much needed field work and collecting followed by careful preparation of material, identification and description.

This time the meeting also included contributors to IGCP project 410 (The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event) and from this we were treated to an instructive lecture on Ordovician biodiversity changes across Baltoscandia by Øyvind Hammer. He has put together an impressive database so-far standing at 8500 records of first and last appearances of a single species at a given locality and freely available on the Internet (asaphus.uio.no). David Harper’s knowledge of Ordovician brachiopods is becoming most impressive and he and Linda Hints from Tallinn share years of experience. It was unfortunate that Leonid Popov and co-workers did not turn up as their abstract promised some new ideas on the evolution of the Baltica palaeocontinent. Discussions on trilobites were well taken care of by Jan Bergström, Arne Nielsen and Kristina Månsson; graptolites by Sven Olaf Egenhoff and Jörg Maletz; conodonts by Anita Löfgren and Jan Rasmussen (who has recently published an ex cellent account “Conodont biostratigraphy and taxonomy of the Ordovician shelf margin deposits in the Scandinavian Caledonides,” in the long awaited Fossils & Strata No. 48 which appeared at the meeting), to mention the most important. Andrei Dronov and his team provided excellent documentation of “fine tuned” stratigraphy, whilst the highlight for me was Bjørn Buchardt’s presentation on carbon and oxygen isotope signals from limestones. His photographs of polished surfaces were made directly from placing the hand specimens on a computer scanner to reveal colour contrasts, crystallisation history and diagenesis. Baltoscandian Ordovician limestones are probably the best preserved in the world and the least altered, yet they provide elevated seawater temperatures of from 35-45 degrees C. This cannot be correct so where is the trap? I am sure Bjørn would be happy to receive suggestions.

The crowd of approximately 45 people contained many new and young faces of both male and female. This is encouraging and I left the meeting convinced that research in the Ordovician of Baltoscandia has an exciting future.

DAVID L. BRUTON

WOGOGOB-2001 was held in Copenhagen May 16th and May 20th. The meeting was arranged by D.A.T. Harper (Geological Museum, Copenhagen), Svend Stouge (Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Copenhagen) and Kent Larsson (Univeristy of Lund, Sweden). The meeting hosted nearly 60 delegates and began with two days of technical sessions in Copenhagen followed by a two-days fieldtrip in Scania, Sweden. The meeting was sponsored by the Geological Museum, Copenhagen, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, the Carlsberg Foundation, the Danish Natural Science Foundation and IGCP Project 410 " The Great Ordovician Diversification Event". Reference: Harper, D.A.T. & S. Stouge 2001 (eds). WOGOGOB-2001. Working Group on the Ordovician of Baltosccandia. Øresund Region, mid May [May 16th (evening) to May 29th] 2001. Abstracts: 47 pp.

SVEND STOUGE