Stephen C. Porter
(Department of Earth and Space Sciences and Quaternary Research Center,
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington USA)
I first met Liu Tungsheng in Moscow (USSR) during the summer of 1982 where we each were attending the 11th Congress of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA). During a day-long bus excursion I had the pleasure of meeting and talking briefly with Liu, and learned about his decades-long study of Chinese loess. Thus began my quarter-century association with China’s foremost Quaternary scientist.
Three years later, in May 1985, Professor Liu was at the Beijing International airport to greet me and the other four members of a small American delegation of Quaternary scientists. The following day our group joined several dozen Chinese scientists at the Institute of Geology (CAS) for a meeting on Quaternary paleoclimatology. Liu was the recognized authority on Chinese loess, paleosols, and their relationship to Quaternary climate change, but my knowledge of the Chinese loess was minimal. I had spent the bulk of my career on studies of Quaternary alpine glaciation, snowline variations, and volcanism. My four colleagues were authorities on climate modeling, tree-ring research, the European loess record, and the historical reconstruction of climate trends. With one exception (George Kukla) our group knew little about Professor Liu and the remarkable eolian stratigraphy of central China that he had studied and written about over the course of his career.
Following the Beijing meeting, three of our group flew on to Xi’an and visited the Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology (LLQG) that had recently been established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the urging of Professor Liu. My subsequent association with the laboratory and close collaboration with its young, enthusiastic Director, An Zhisheng, spanned the next 22 years. The evolution of the laboratory has been truly remarkable. Just as China was entering an era of rapid growth and increasing prosperity, the small laboratory in Xi’an was being transformed into a major research facility: the Institute of Earth Environment. Professor Liu’s vision for the lab was prophetic and his timing was excellent. As questions about climate change and global warming rapidly gained international attention, the work of the laboratory and the Institute became increasingly relevant and important.
This visit to Xi’an led to my collaboration, as a Guest Professor, with Professor Liu’s colleagues in the LLQG over the next two decades. During these years Liu was instrumental in fostering cooperative studies between Chinese and foreign scientists. Such joint projects led to an increased worldwide awareness of the importance of the thick, continuous Chinese loess record as a prime terrestrial repository of paleoclimatic data spanning the last 7 million years.
In 1991 my interaction with Liu Tungsheng increased considerably when he was elected President of INQUA at the thirteenth congress of the union in Beijing. He had served four years as an INQUA Vice President, and his election to President during the Chinese congress was widely applauded. I also joined the Executive Committee at that time, which meant I would meet Liu and the six other committee members every year to conduct INQUA business. At the end of his presidential term, Professor Liu became Past President and continued to serve on the Executive Committee during the next four-year inter-congress period. Our terms overlapped for eight years (1991-1999), a period during which I came to know far better, and increasingly appreciate, my distinguished INQUA colleague.
When Liu became INQUA’s president, the Executive Committee was considering a significant change in the organization’s structure. Until this time, the Union was divided into a dozen commissions, some based on Quaternary disciplines (e.g., Stratigraphy), some on geography (e.g., South America), and others reflecting particular areas of research interest (e.g., Tephrochronology). INQUA’S limited resources were divided into unequal pieces of the financial ‘pie’, not always based on past performance or need. A simplified and more equable organization clearly was needed. Over the course of this inter-congress period, the Executive Committee discussed various approaches and settled on one that made good sense: a reduction in the number of commissions and a system of financial grants based on competition and merit. This appraisal was begun as an initiative during Professor Liu’s administration and the committee’s proposal was finally approved in 1995 at the Berlin congress. By the time Professor Liu completed his term as Past President, the new structure was in place and operating effectively. INQUA now consists of five commissions that embrace all the principle Quaternary sciences (Coastal and Marine Processes; Paleoclimate; Paleoecology and Human Evolution; Stratigraphy and Chronology; and Terrestrial Processes, Deposits, and History). Various subcommissions propose and monitor a wide range of research projects.
Over the past three decades Liu became instrumental in fostering cooperative field and laboratory studies involving Chinese and foreign scientists. As part of these projects, Chinese scientists have been invited to work in foreign laboratories. Liu was a major catalyst in many of these endeavors, which helped cement close relationships between leading Chinese institutions and their foreign counterparts.
In 1990, a meeting of the Steering Committee of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program was held in Austria to formulate a strategy for paleoenvironmental research. Liu and I were among the participants. He was energetic in helping formulate IGBP’s new initiative on Past Global Changes that has produced a large number of international and interdisciplinary projects and generated a vast body of paleoenvironmental information.
One of Liu Tungsheng’s proudest moments came in 1991 when he hosted the world INQUA community in Beijing during INQUA’s 13th Congress. For foreign attendees this conference offered a unique opportunity to participate in excursions that visited important Quaternary exposures throughout the country and to discuss their interpretation with Chinese scientists who had studied the sites.
Professor Liu was an enthusiastic global traveler and managed to visit all the continents in the course of his long and adventurous career. His wife, Hu Changkang, often accompanied him on his journeys. Ever observant and curious, he became well versed in the world-wide evidence of Quaternary climate change.
Throughout his long professional career Liu’s leadership and participation in a wide range of scientific programs brought him widespread recognition and well-deserved honors. He was invariably modest and cheerful, had an infectious smile, and was delightful company in the field. Such personal attributes gained him many friends in many lands. With his passing, we are left with fond memories of this gentle and remarkable man who was an outstanding scientist and leader.
