Norway bids farewell to IUGS? Not exactly

We would like to supplement the piece by Susan Turner in GEO 01, 2010 under the unusual title "Norway farewells IUGS".

Rognvald Boyd, IUGS Secretariat, NGU and Anders Elverhøi, Chairman, National Committee for IUGS

Susan Turner is a vertebrate palaeontologist who is a Geoscience Consultant, part-time Lecturer in Geoscience at Monash University and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Queensland Museum (entry in Encyclopaedia of Australian Science) and who has a keen interest in various aspects of the history of the geosciences. INHIGEO, the IUGS International Commission on the History of the Geological Sciences, has been asked to facilitate the preparation of a history of IUGS to mark the organization's 50^th anniversary in 2011: Susan Turner is coordinating this activity and spent two weeks in Trondheim as the guest of the Norwegian National Committee for IUGS so that she could consult the IUGS archives before their transfer to the new secretariat at the USGS in Reston. This visit gave her the opportunity to interview numerous people who have been involved in IUGS in many different capacities and who are acquainted with the history of the organization and of Norway's involvement with it.

Norway is not bidding farewell to IUGS, indeed the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters is in the process of appointing a new National Committee and there is every reason to believe that Norwegian geoscientists will maintain their activity in many of the organizations within IUGS.

Credit for the approval of continued, long-term support for the IUGS Secretariat in 1989 must be given to Egil Bergsager, who was Chairman of the NGU Board at that time and to Knut S. Heier, then NGU Director. The maintenance of this support over the following twenty years has been a result of the persuasive skills of the late Knut Heier and of his successors Arne Bjørlykke and Morten Smelror.

There are doubtless many views on how the archives of an organization such as IUGS should be preserved. In this case the IUGS Executive Committee has been clear in its instructions that the archive, by now with most key documents in digital form, should be transferred to the new home of the Secretariat.

Hanne Refsdal led the Secretariat from 1985 to 2004: her sterling performance in this role was recognized by IUGS in selecting her as one of the two recipients of the first James M. Harrison Award for Outstanding Achievement, presented to her at the 32^nd IGC in Florence in 2004 (Harrison was IUGS President from 1961-64).

Anne Liinamaa-Dehls has worked in the Secretariat from 1997 and has done an outstanding job for IUGS since taking over main responsibility in 2004, including much work related to IGC33, to the International Year of the Planet Earth, to digitalization of key documents and to the transfer of the archive to Reston. The IUGS Executive Committee thanked her for the hard, systematic work she has done for the organization at their recent meeting in Paris and we would like to join them in acknowledging this.

Finally, we encourage geoscientists in Norway to play an active role in IUGS in the future!

Read Susan Turners article Norway farewells IUGS

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