This was a two-day conference entitled ‘Neotectonics: recent advances’ convened by L. Owen, I. Stewart, C. Vita-Finzi & N-A. Mörner at Burlington House on 16–17 June 1992. The meeting, held under the auspices of the Quaternary Research Association, the Tectonic Studies Group and the INQUA association, was designed as a forum for discussion on the current state of play of an emerging discipline and the future directions to which the subject might look.
With seven years having passed since Hancock & Williams (1986) convened a meeting on the burgeoning theme of ‘Neotectonics’ at Burlington House, it appeared timely to assess the degree to which the subject had subsequently progressed and to promote new developments taking place within it. In contrast to the initial meeting, which was organized on behalf of the Tectonic Studies Group and attended largely by UK-based structural geologists and seismologists, the recent meeting attracted a large international response from researchers in a wide range of fields, reflecting more fully the multi-disciplinary nature of the subject.
An important facet of the meeting was to encourage international collaboration between neotectonic communities, and to this end the conference hosted business meetings for the INQUA Neotectonics Commission, a subcommission on the Formalisation of Neotectonic Maps and the International Lithosphere Programme’s ‘Palaeo-seimicity of the Holocene’. It was particularly gratifying that, of over one hundred papers submitted for oral and poster presentation (Mörner et al. 1992), the vast majority of these were from overseas scientists. In all, the meeting itself was attended