ORDOVICIAN NEWS SUBCOMMISSION ON ORDOVICIAN STRATIGRAPHY INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON STRATIGRAPHY Number 38 (for 2020) Edited by Bertrand Lefebvre INTERNATIONAL UNION OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCES President: John LUDDEN (United Kingdom) Vice-Presidents: Daekyo CHEONG (Korea) Hassina MOURI (South Africa) Secretary General: Stanley C. FINNEY (USA) Treasurer: Hiroshi KITAZATO (Japan) INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON STRATIGRAPHY Chairman: David A.T. HARPER (United Kingdom) Vice-Chairman: Shuzhong SHEN (China) Secretary General: Philip GIBBARD (United Kingdom) SUBCOMMISSION ON ORDOVICIAN STRATIGRAPHY Chairman: Thomas SERVAIS (France) Vice-Chairman: ZHAN Renbin (China) Secretary: Bertrand LEFEBVRE (France) Sachiko AGEMATSU-WATANABE (Japan) Matilde BERESI (Argentina) André DESROCHERS (Canada) Mansoureh GHOBADI POUR (Iran) Daniel GOLDMAN (USA) Lars HOLMER (Sweden) Petr KRAFT (Czech Republic) Patrick I. McLAUGHLIN (USA) Tõnu MEIDLA (Estonia) Leon NORMORE (Australia) Elena RAEVSKAYA (Russia) Alycia STIGALL (USA) Tatiana TOLMACHEVA (Russia) WANG Wenhui (China) Charles WELLMAN (United Kingdom) Seth YOUNG (USA) Yong Yi ZHEN (Australia) Ordovician Subcommission website : http://ordovician.stratigraphy.org CONTENTS Page CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE 2 SECRETARY’S MESSAGE 5 ANNUAL REPORT OF ORDOVICIAN SUBCOMMISSION FOR 2020 6 ONLINE MEETING OF THE VOTING MEMBERS OF THE SUBCOMMISSION 15 BOOK REVIEW • The Ordovician Period – a new contribution chapter to Geologic Time Scale 2020 (Gradstein et al., eds.: Elsevier, 2020) 17 REPORTS OF RECENT CONFERENCES • IGCP 653 virtual Annual Meeting, Copenhagen, September 2020 19 CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS • IGCP 668 virtual Annual Meeting, Tsukuba, July 2021 21 • IGCP 653/735 virtual Annual Meeting, Lille, September 2021 24 • International Conference on Palaeobiology, High Resolution Stratigraphy and Fossil Energy, Nanjing, November 2021 26 • IGCP 735 – SOS Regional Meeting, Lille, May–June 2022 30 • 14th International Symposium on the Ordovician System, Estonia, 2023 38 NEW IGCP PROJECT • IGCP 735: Rocks and the Rise of Ordovician Life (Rocks n'ROL). Filling knowledge gaps in the Early Palaeozoic Biodiversification, 2021–2025 39 IN MEMORIAM • Richard P.S. JEFFERIES (1932–2020) 42 • Martin KELLER (1958–2020) 46 • John F.V. RIVA (1929–2020) 51 ORDOVICIAN RESEARCH REPORTS & CONTACTS 56 RECENT ORDOVICIAN RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS 92 Cover photo The fine grey crystalline limestones of the Mt Jolmo Lungma Formation (Darriwilian, Middle Ordovician) at the height of 8550 m, on the way to the summit of Mt Jolmo Lungma (Mt Everest). The photo was taken by the Xizang (Tibet) Mountaineering Team during the May 2020 Survey-Mountaineering Expedition aiming at getting the most accurate measurement of Mt Jolmo Lungma, and eventually resulted in a height estimate of 8848.86 m announced by both China and Nepal in 2020. Photograph courtesy of the Xizang (Tibet) Mountaineering Team, via Zhang Yuandong. For more details on the Ordovician System in the Mt Jolmo Lungma region, please refer to Fang et al. (2020) (doi: 10.19839/j.cnki.dcxzz.2020.0039). Ordovician News, volume 38 for 2020 (distributed April 2021) Copyright © IUGS 2021 1 CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE This is my first message as chairman of the ‘Ordovician Subcommission’ because this is the first ‘Ordovician News’ issue with me in this role. Last year I should have taken over the job from the previous chair, Andrei Dronov, during the official meeting of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) at the 36th International Geological Congress (IGC) at New Delhi, India (early March, 2020), but the organisers in India cancelled the Congress in the last minute. This was before the global outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, but already too late to stop the very numerous Chinese delegates getting to New Delhi in March 2020. Postponed a few times, initially to November 2020, the IGC still did not take place (and at the time of the writing of these lines is re-scheduled for August 2021), but the IUGS and the ICS had to advance, and the new Ordovician Subcommission with the new executive took over somewhat virtually during July and August 2020. Now, I will not go to the 36th International Geological Congress, if ever it will take place. Many participants (including me), lost a lot of money, with air tickets and hotel rooms being booked, and not always being able to be cancelled, and the refund policy of the organisers being somewhat disorganized and extremely late. Well, that was 2020. We all have our (bad) experiences of that year, that will be remembered, by all of us, for one reason or another, but certainly it will be in our memories in the next decades. And 2021 looks very similar so far… The composition of the new Subcommission, i.e. the Executive and the Voting (Titular) Members is published in the present issue. The changes have been announced in the last issue of Ordovician News (n°37) in the chairman’s message by Andrei Dronov. The list of the former Voting Members (2016–2020) was published in the last four issues of Ordovician News. For the next years (2020–2024), we have a new Subcommission, with a slightly higher number of Members (+3), more female Members (+4) totaling now seven women, and covering almost all disciplines, and all (palaeo-) continents. The new Subcommission came together a few weeks ago for the first time. The covid-19 pandemic forced us to meet online, and this actually allowed us to have a first meeting with ALL voting members. This is extraordinary ! Probably never in the long existence of the Subcommission have all voting members come together at the same time. Internet (and covid- 19) made this possible. You can find a short report about this meeting in this newsletter. There will be surely more meetings with this format in future ! The International Geoscience Programmes (IGCP) also suffered from the covid-19. All IGCP meetings have been cancelled in 2020 (except for a single IGCP project, n°668, that organized its annual meeting before the global pandemic), and in 2021 it very much looks the same. IGCP 653 (The onset of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event) was running from 2016 to 2020 (see reports of meetings in the previous issues of Ordovician News), and was expected to be on extended term (OET) in 2021, with several meetings, including the main annual meetings in Copenhagen in September 2020 and in Lille in September 2021. The Copenhagen meeting was cancelled on-site, but was maintained online. Although (similarly to the virtual meeting of the voting members) the Copenhagen congress was ‘only’ online, it can be considered as a huge success. Instead of having the usual 50 to 100 scientists, present physically in a lecture hall, and during an excursion, there were over 200 participants registered from all over the world, listening to the online keynote lectures and talks, allowing 2 many to participate, when intercontinental flights were not possible, and for many scientists were, and will be, not affordable. You can read a report on the meeting in this issue. Many thanks to Chris Rasmussen, Alycia Stigall and all others who helped in the organisation to make this major Ordovician congress in Copenhagen possible ! The 2021 annual meeting in Lille in September will hopefully be similar. Again, the covid- 19 pandemic will not allow us to keep this meeting on-site, and certainly not the organisation of the field trips in Belgium and in the (post-Brexit) UK. As the Copenhagen meeting, the Lille meeting will take place, at the initial dates, but only online. Please, look out for the information about this meeting in this issue of Ordovician News. However, due to a large demand, the excursions will be maintained, and are now postponed to spring 2022. The pre- and post-congress excursions will take place before and after the indoor sessions at Lille, scheduled May 30th–June 1st, 2022. The First Circular is presented in this issue. The meeting will no longer run under the flag of IGCP 653 (that will be definitively over), but under that of IGCP 735. IGCP 735 is indeed the new International Geoscience Programme dedicated to the Ordovician. It was accepted earlier this year by the UNESCO/IGCP. Congratulations to the eight co-leaders. The full title of IGCP 735 is ‘Rocks and the Rise of Ordovician Life (Rocks n'ROL). Filling knowledge gaps in the Early Palaeozoic Biodiversification’ and it will run from 2021 to 2025. The eight leaders (including six female scientist, and half of the leaders working in ‘developing’ countries) propose a very exciting programme for the next five years (2021–2025). You can find further details in this issue. This IGCP is also strongly linked to the Ordovician Subcommission, with four co-leaders being actually Voting Members of our Subcommission. In addition to the meetings related directly to the IGCP’s, there are a few other meetings that should be also postponed, and that are also on our agenda. The Baltic Stratigraphic Congress was scheduled in Saint Petersburg in September 2020, and is currently postponed. Similarly, we are looking forward to the official inauguration of the new ASSP for the base of the Ordovician System in the Xiaoyangqiao section at Dayangcha, North China, ratified in 2019 by the Ordovician Subcommission. The ceremony was scheduled in May 2020, but is currently also postponed. Among the other major events in the next years, we can announce the main annual meeting of IGCP 735 in Marrakech, Morocco, in October, 2022, and our next Congress on the Ordovician System in Tartu, Estonia, in 2023 (see first announcement in Ordovician News n°37 and further information in this issue n° 38). In the last issues of Ordovician News you may have seen the announcement of a publication on a ‘Global Synthesis on the Ordovician System’ initiated almost ten years ago. One of the tasks of the current Executive of the Subcommission is to move forward with this project, and to finally see the publication of this book series, hopefully before the next Ordovician Congress in Estonia.