Conferences 2003

There has been an SEGJ Geophysical conference in Japan in January, and an ASEG in Adelaide Australia in February. Both conferences proved very successful against objectives. The HAGI conference, YOGYA2003 was cancelled due to the uncertainty which arose following the tragedy in Bali.

Currently I am more informed on statistics and details related to ASEG, but as you will see there is a high level of collaboration between these societies.

SEGJ had a high proportion of international visitors and presenters. ASEG and SEG were co-sponsors. There are of the order of 200 attendees with greater than 25% from abroad. The opportunity was taken at this conference to convene a joint meeting with ASEG representative and Co-Chairman Professor John McDonald to discuss progressing plans with joint publications with the ASEG.

ASEG has been working with SEGJ providing translation and editing support by Koya Suto (ASEG) and Mike Asten (ASEG) over the last 2 years on a geo-technical publication “ The Microtremor Survey Method” and then through the intervention of Koya with SEG a joint society publication has been produced. This was a significant milestone due to the extended interaction and inter-society outcome. Koya will be honoured by the SEGJ in their May meeting for his untiring efforts to promote inter-society interaction.

The ASEG conference was highly successful attracting 660 delegates with a good proportion of both minerals and petroleum delegates. The conference had a specialist 3DEM conference run in association. The conference was co-sponsored by EAGE and SEG. Mike Bahorich was unable to attend, and was represented by Walt Lynn, Henk van Montfrans represented the EAGE (Secretary), Professor Yuzuru Ashida President of SEGJ and as attendees Rob Stewart (CSEG) and Fred Hilterman and Brian Russell.

During this conference along with the ASEG committee and council meetings I took the opportunity to convene a special SEGJ – ASEG meeting to discuss our plans to produce a joint publication for our societies. Additionally I convened an inter-society meeting that included representatives of SEG, EAGE, SEGJ, PESA affiliated with AAPG and of course the ASEG.

SEGJ-ASEG meeting outcomes. This meeting goal was to build on previous discussions to produce a joint publication. We spent time understanding our current organizations efforts on publications and what both societies would gain from this type of publication we would expect from our joint efforts. We discussed the potential for web publishing in assisting this effort and we also discussed the issues of publishing a journal such as ISI accreditation, international exposure, costs, impact on our current efforts. We concluded with the commitment to this goal, and will proceed to producing a publication that would provide to our joint membership. The ASEG executive has subsequently confirmed this action (April 2003) with a commitment to achieve this publication by December 2003. At the end of the conference, SEGJ President Professor Ashida and other attendees from SEGJ, kindly hosted a social gathering between many SEGJ delegates and ASEG members. This particularly underlined the developing ties.

The inter society meeting was convened to provide an informal discussion medium for joint activities. This included Secretary of EAGE Henk van Monfrans, SEG Past President Brian Russell on behalf of Mike Bahorich, Professor Ashida SEGJ, Barry Goldstein PESA, ad hoc GAC committee Chairman Brian Spies (past President ASEG) and various other ASEG committee members. We confirmed that we would actively pursue interactive and collaborative activities as the best way to further the goals of our respective memberships. In fact in general we are all members of each other’s societies and as a consequence would like to see how we can best achieve benefits for our members in an efficient and collaborative sense.

Some information that we gained from SEGJ. It is a society of 1500 members under the able Presidency of Professor Yuzuru Ashida. It has technical meetings twice a year and holds international conferences every second year. It has a quite broad membership interests, geotechnical, deep earth geophysics, electromagnetic, civil engineering in addition to its petroleum interests. It produces a Japanese language publication Butsuri-Tansa. They have strong associations with SEG and EAGE, and have taken leadership in establishing interaction with geophysical societies in Korea and memorandum of understanding with Viet Nam and Beijing in China. This is an excellent basis for a strong Asia Pacific association

The ASEG has a membership of 1300 which is roughly divided equally between minerals and petroleum members, predominantly from Australia, although we do have our international members. We also have a growing environmental geophysics emphasis. We produce a quarterly journal “ Exploration Geophysics” and a bi-monthly topical journal “Preview”. ASEG also produces special interest journals such as the recent issue on “Salinity and Land Management”. (www.aseg.org.au). ASEG is a national society with state committees, with a national executive that rotates around the states. It runs a conference every 18 months which provides support for our publications. We have been planning our conferences out to 2006. We have been very pro-active in establishing joint conferences for our common constituencies. In this respect we will have a joint ASEG-PESA conference in August 2004 in Sydney. We are currently discussing a joint conference with AAPG and PESA 2006 in Perth. We have a very close association with the SEG as an affiliate society and have right of three members on the SEG Council.

As I gain an understanding of other societies within Asia-Pacific I will pass on the information as a means for us to identify common goals and assist each other to spread geophysical expertise. Through this we will gain an understanding of building interaction and so address the goals of the GAC of the SEG.