We are pleased to invite you to attend the International Conference on Geoevents, Geological Heritage, and the Role of the IGCP to be held in Caravaca de la Cruz, southeastern Spain, from Wednesday 15th to Saturday 18th of September 2010.

The year 2010 marks the 35th anniversary of the Spanish National Committee, and for this occasion the Municipal Council of Caravaca graciously offered to sponsor the commemorative Conference, as it did in June 2003 for the international conference on Bioevents, their stratigraphic records, patterns and causes, which included several topics related to IGCP projects. Thus, the present International Conference on Geoevents, Geological Heritage, and the Role of the IGCP is a joint effort between the IGCP Spanish National Committee and the Caravaca Municipal Council.

European Regional Meetings of the IGCP have been organized at variable intervals under the sponsorship of a host nation volunteering to patronize an event of this kind, and the last one was held in the Czech Republic in 1999. Since Spain has never been the venue of such a meeting, we took the opportunity to submit a proposal for such conference to the 37th Session of the IGCP Scientific Board in Paris on February 20th, 2009, which approved it unanimously. The 2010 meeting thus invites delegates of the IGCP National Committees to present the main activities and accomplishments of their respective committees, and further discuss topics of common interest.

In this first decade of the 21st Century interests continue to focus on global phenomena which produced relevant changes in the Earth's Natural History: evolution of life, extreme changes in climate such as Ice House Earth and Green House Earth, global balance of the carbon cycle, biosphere-geosphere feedback, plate tectonics and orogenies, extraterrestrial phenomena, etc. For more than 25 years numerous IGCP projects(*) have addressed these issues, and the results of their inquiries brought considerable improvement to our understanding of the long history of our planet, as far back as the late Proterozoic to the more recent Quaternary Ice House. IGCP projects have been a successful arena for interdisciplinary research, especially since the 1980's, e.g., IGCP project nº 216 Biological events in Earth History, when geochemists, paleontologists, stratigraphers, sedimentologists, etc., successfully collaborated to make the geological record more understandable.

So far, the results of IGCP Projects have allowed to recognize and set aside numerous localities worldwide, which show uniqueness in their fossil record, stratigraphic significance, etc. that are of global importance. These findings prompted geological institutions to propose conservation programs such as Geosites and, especially Geoparks, to the IGCP. They will allow preservation of these localities as natural educational topical sites, thereby building mutually beneficial relationships between geoscientists, sites owners and/or local and regional authorities. The geologic heritage in Europe is under the advocacy of the European Association for the Conservation of the Geological Heritage "ProGEO". Its representative in Spain, the Commission on Geological Heritage of the Sociedad Geológica de España, in collaboration with the IGCP Spanish Committee, will organize a symposium focused on the SW European countries: France, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

(*) Such as projects no. 476, 478, 481, 490, 491, 493, 495, 497, 499, 500, 503, 506, 507, 509, 511, 512, 521, 524, 526, 546, 555, 559, 567, 571, 572, 581, 582, whose topics are elegible for the symposium Geoevents.