International Conference “Marine Geology: Marginal Seas - Past and Future”

On December 14-17, 2021, the International Conference “Marine Geology: Marginal Seas – Past and Future” was held via videoconferencing. The conference was organized by the Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey, China Geological Survey (GMGS/CGS), with the support of the Ministry of Natural Resources of the People's Republic of China.

The A.P. Karpinsky Russian Geological Research Institute was one of the international co-organizers of the conference. Oleg Petrov, VSEGEI Director General, delivered welcoming address at the opening of the conference. In his brief report, O.V. Petrov spoke about the directions of the Institute's work in marginal Arctic and Far Eastern seas. As part of these studies, in 2019, the Tectonic Map of the Arctic was published by the Commission for the Geological Map of the World at UNESCO; in 2020, the creation of the Tectonostratigraphic Atlas of the Eastern Arctic was completed, and the compilation of the Tectonostratigraphic Atlas of the Western Arctic was started in cooperation with the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, the Geological Survey of Norway and Rosneft.

Four plenary reports, ten key reports were presented at the conference (including the presentation of P.V. Rekant and O.V. Petrov “New model of seafloor spreading in the Eurasian basin (Arctic Ocean): Insights from the analysis of the sediment basin architecture”) and thirty-three oral reports. The conference, organized as part of the preparation of the major international project “Marginal Seas of Eurasia: Past and Future”, was attended by specialists from 28 countries from five continents.

Currently, marine geological studies are rising to a completely new level, both in terms of the development of scientific theory, and due to the rapid development of technological innovations. Over the past years, the number of special research vessels designed for geoscientific studying deep-water areas of the ocean and coastal zones, including in high latitudes, has been constantly increasing. In 2019, the idea of a large international initiative “Marginal Seas of Eurasia: Past and Future” arose aimed at further developing international cooperation in marine geology at the global level.

The project is supported by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG). Currently, the project “Morphological Evolution of Inland Seas – Past and Future” has been launched with the support of the Deep-time Digital Earth Science Program (IUGS-DDE) and IAMG.

VSEGEI employees P.V. Rekant, D.V. Ryabchuk and D.V. Prishchepenko made presentations on new results of the Institute's geological studies in the Arctic seas.