The International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics

Like all large families, the group of scientific unions with the International Council of Scientific Unions as foster mother has a wide range of interests: one of the elder members of the family, the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, is itself big enough and broad enough in outlook to find a place for sciences with superficially so little in common as geodesy and hydrology, seismology and oceanography, vulcanology and meteorology, terrestrial magnetism and atmospheric electricity. So the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics is a real confederation of unions (or associations, as they are called in the Union), each more or less autonomous, having its own president, secretary and bureau, its own statutes and by-laws and its own procedure for dealing with the problems within its domain. In addition, there is a Commission on Continental and Oceanic Structure which has the status of an association, and, more recently formed, a primary Committee on the Social Value of the Earth Sciences to look after the broader economic, social and political implications of the Union's work. Most of the associations have a number of sections or committees specializing in various aspects of their fields of geophysics.