President's page: The AGU and its national obligation

Abstract

The American Geophysical Union as a major scientific society, as well as the official body of the National Academy of Sciences representing the United States in the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, has a responsibility not only to its members but to the nation. In the past the discharge of this responsibility has been oriented primarily toward the advance of the geophysical sciences and the dissemination of science information. Through its special committees for the geophysical and geological study of the continents and ocean basins, the AGU was instrumental from 1935 to 1942 in launching many significant programs that have contributed to a better understanding not only of the geology and underlying crust beneath the continents and ocean basins but also of the climatology of the past, tectonic relations, the Earth's gravity field, magnetic relations, and other aspects of the Earth. The AGU has met the changing requirements of the geophysical scientific community by expanding its organizational format, through the addition of new sections, such as Tectonophysics and Planetary Sciences, and also through reorganization and expansion of its publications. Whereas in 1937 there was a single annual edition of the Transactions, the Union now publishes the Transactions as a quarterly house organ; the Journal of Geophysical Research, which appears monthly in two sections divided on the basis of space‐oriented and Earth‐oriented investigations; Reviews of Geophysics, which appears quarterly; the new quarterly Water Resources Research; a monograph and an antarctic series; and regular translations of the following Russian geophysical publications: Izvestiya, Geodesy and Aerophotography, Soviet Oceanography, Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, Soviet Hydrology, and Soviet Antarctic Expedition.