Yesterday, October 21, International Conference 'Kazan Golovkinsky Stratigraphic Meeting 2014' officially opened at the KFU Institute of Geology and Petroleum Technologies.

This year the 3-day long conference (October 21-23) gathered stratigraphy experts from Russia, the Ukraine, Germany, France, the USA, Canada, China, Marocco, and South Africa to present contributions to Carboniferous and Permian Earth systems, stratigraphic events, biotic evolution, sedimentary basins and resources.

The agenda suggests open sessions and a meeting of the ICCP-2015 Working Group during a boat cruise along the Volga River with a stop for deposit examination.

The conference bears the name of Nikolay Golovkinsky (1834 – 1897), an outstanding fundamental geologist and hydrageologist, who started his scientific career in Kazan University with a well-known work “On Permian formation of the central part of Kama and Volga basin”. Nikolai Golovkinsky, first professor and leader of the Kazan School of Geology, laid some of the earliest foundations for the study of Upper Paleozoic sedimentary deposits in the Volga-Kama basin of Tatarstan. The Carboniferous and Permian sedimentary basins display a wide variety of facies, as their evolution was associated with immense paleogeographic and biotic changes in space and time. The climatically-driven increase in bioproductivity and the formation of extensive reef complexes led to the formation of oil and gas deposits in Russia and all over the world, hugely increasing the importance of multidisciplinary studies of the entire suite of biotic and abiotic processes in marine and non-marine ecosystems.

All the reports will be published in a conference digest after the event.