About Chinese Geophysical Society

Chinese Geophysical Society

The Chinese Geophysical Society (中国地球物理学会, CGS) is China's national learned society for geophysics — the physics of the solid Earth and its fluid and space environments — and one of the largest scientific societies in China. It was inaugurated in Shanghai in August 1947, rebuilt in 1953 in attachment to the Institute of Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and since 1954 has been based in Beijing, where it remains under the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The Society unites the communities that study earthquakes, the Earth's magnetic field, its gravity and shape, its deep interior and the exploration methods that image the subsurface for oil, gas, minerals and engineering. Its annual gathering, held in recent years as the Annual Meeting of the Chinese Geoscience Union, which the Society jointly initiated, is the principal congress of China's solid-earth and exploration geophysics community, and its journals — above all the Chinese Journal of Geophysics, published since 1948 — are the discipline's senior Chinese periodicals.

Geophysics occupies a distinctive place in Chinese science because it is simultaneously a basic science and a strategic technology. The same seismic methods that reveal the structure of the crust and mantle also locate oilfields and coal measures; the same geomagnetic observatories that serve space-weather science also support navigation and resource surveys; and earthquake science is a public-safety duty in one of the world's most seismically active countries. A national society for the field therefore has to serve academics, state institutes and the great state energy companies at once, and the sponsorship recorded for this Society — the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the natural resources ministry, the China Earthquake Administration and the national oil companies CNPC, Sinopec and CNOOC — reflects exactly that span.

Foundation in Shanghai in 1947: nine subjects

The Society's inaugural meeting was convened in August 1947 in Shanghai. A history of the Institute of Geophysics published in the journal History of Geo- and Space Sciences records that the Chinese Geophysical Society, "a national society, convened its inaugural meeting in August 1947 in Shanghai", and conference accounts of the Society give the nine primary subjects on which it was founded: geodesy, seismology, meteorology, geomagnetism, geoelectricity, volcanology, hydrology, tectonophysics and applied geophysics. That list is a snapshot of what "geophysics" meant in 1947 — a broad church that still included meteorology and hydrology, fields that would later develop strong societies of their own, alongside the solid-earth core of seismology, geomagnetism and geodesy that still defines the Society today.

The founding came at the end of a difficult era. Historians of the period note that before the 1950s the discipline of geophysics in China, meteorology excepted, had a very weak foundation and few researchers; a modicum of strength had accumulated in seismology, geomagnetism and physical prospecting under the Nationalist government, and the new Society gathered that scattered community into a single national body, two years before the founding of the People's Republic transformed the institutional landscape around it.

A journal in 1948, and rebuilding in Beijing

Publishing was an early priority. In June 1948 the first issue of the Journal of the Chinese Geophysical Society was published in English, a choice the historical record explains as intended "to promote communication with international peers" — a strikingly outward-looking decision for a society less than a year old, in a country in civil war. That journal is the ancestor of today's Chinese Journal of Geophysics, the Society's flagship, whose Chinese edition (ISSN 0001-5733) appears twelve times a year.

The Society's institutional life was interrupted and then rebuilt. In 1953 the Geophysical Society was rebuilt and attached to the Institute of Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences — the institute, formed in 1950 by integrating China's scattered geomagnetism and geophysical-exploration groups, which became the discipline's national centre. The Society moved its base to Beijing in 1954 when the institute relocated from Nanjing, and through the institute's later evolution its home is now the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing. Attachment to the Academy's geophysics institute has remained the Society's anchor ever since: its secretariat, its journals' editorial offices and many of its committee leaders are drawn from that institute and its sister institutes.

Membership and committees

Published figures for the Society's size differ by date and source, and are best read as snapshots. The Society's own summary carried in the directory record for this profile gives roughly 14,700 registered members, including dozens of academicians of the Chinese academies. A fuller conference biography of the Society describes more than 25,000 registered members supported by about 2,000 member units — institutes, universities, government bodies and companies — across some thirty academic committees. Both accounts agree on the structure if not the census date: a large individual membership, a substantial organisational membership from the institutes and companies that employ geophysicists, and a committee system of around thirty specialist bodies.

Those committees map the modern discipline. The conference biography lists committees for solid geophysics, exploration geophysics, geophysical technology, marine geophysics, fluid Earth sciences, engineering geophysics, natural disaster prediction, geo-electromagnetics, environmental geophysics, information techniques, continental dynamics, geothermal resources and geothermal energy, geomagnetism, national safety geophysics, near-surface geophysics, space weather, mine safety and geophysics, petrophysics, oil and gas geophysics, planetary physics, well-hole (borehole) geophysics, metal mineral exploration, smart pipe networks, geodetic survey and remote sensing, nuclear geophysics, aerial and aerospace geophysics, and intelligent geophysics. The list itself documents the field's expansion: alongside the classical subjects stand committees for planetary physics — serving China's lunar and planetary missions — and for intelligent geophysics, serving the data-driven methods now reshaping subsurface imaging.

Data and informatics: the Society's information work

Geophysics runs on data — observatory series, survey archives and monitoring streams accumulated over decades — and the Society has organised that reality institutionally. A review of geophysical informatics in China published in the Data Science Journal describes how Chinese geophysicists built data banks, data centres, monitoring and transfer systems and advanced analysis methods for data "on land, ocean, and space", and how a new sub-discipline, geophysical informatics, developed over twenty years on that foundation. The Society's Committee of Geophysical Informatics, with its Data and Information Platform Center in Beijing, is the organisational expression of that work, and its members were central to China's participation in the electronic Geophysical Year initiative of 2007–2008 and to the World Data Center system for geophysics. For a directory, the point is structural: this Society does not only convene meetings and publish papers, it also stewards the data infrastructure of its science.

The journals: from the Chinese Journal of Geophysics to EPP

The Society's publishing portfolio spans Chinese and English titles. The Chinese Journal of Geophysics, published since 1948, remains the senior journal of Chinese geophysics, covering the Earth's physical properties, seismic activity and tectonic processes with experimental and computational methods. Applied Geophysics, its English-language companion in the applied field, is designed, in its publisher's words, "to provide an academic realm for a broad blend of academic and industry papers to promote rapid communication and exchange of ideas between Chinese and worldwide geophysicists", covering applications in energy, resources, environment, disaster work, engineering, information, military uses and surveying. Progress in Geophysics serves the Chinese-reading research community with review and research coverage across the field.

The newest title marks the Society's international ambition. Earth and Planetary Physics (EPP; ISSN 2096-3955) was launched in November 2017, co-sponsored by the Society, the Institute of Geology and Geophysics and Science Press. It is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal publishing bimonthly in English, indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, EI, Scopus and the Chinese Science Citation Database, with an international editorial panel: its editor-in-chief is Yongxin Pan of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, with John A. Tarduno of the University of Rochester and Yong Wei among its deputy editors. EPP's scope is deliberately wide — solid-earth geophysics, atmospheric physics, space physics and planetary sciences — reflecting how far the Society's remit now extends beyond the classical solid Earth. Pan's dual role, as editor-in-chief of both EPP and, from 2018, the Chinese Journal of Geophysics, illustrates the close editorial integration of the Society's Chinese and English flagships.

Congresses: the Geoscience Union annual meeting

The Society's congress life now centres on the Annual Meeting of the Chinese Geoscience Union, jointly initiated and hosted by the Chinese Geophysical Society together with partner committees of the geological and geographical societies. The eleventh annual meeting was held in Xiamen on 19–23 October 2024, and the twelfth in Chengdu on 18–22 October 2025, with topics spanning joint and international themes, space and planetary sciences, geophysical methods, exploration geophysics, earthquake mechanisms and disaster prevention, geodesy and geodynamics, deep Earth structure, and crust–mantle interaction. A union meeting of this scale — thousands of earth scientists across societies — is a different instrument from a single-society conference: it makes the Geophysical Society a co-owner of Chinese geoscience's largest common platform.

Below that level, the committees run their own specialist meetings. The Committee on Planetary Physics, for example, organised the 2024 National Planetary Science Conference in Nanjing on 6–12 October 2024, jointly with committees of the Chinese Astronomical Society and other bodies, covering frontiers in planetary research, exploration technology and the building of the planetary-science discipline in China — a field that barely existed as an organised community when the Society was founded, and which its committee system has been able to absorb.

Sponsors and the applied mission

The Society's recorded sponsors — the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the ministry responsible for natural resources, the China Earthquake Administration and the oil companies CNPC, Sinopec and CNOOC — are not ceremonial names. They correspond to the three great employers of Chinese geophysicists: the research academies, the state geological and earthquake services, and the energy industry. Exploration geophysics in particular binds the Society to China's energy security: seismic surveying for oil, gas and minerals is one of the largest applications of applied science in the country, and the Society's committees on oil and gas geophysics, metal mineral exploration and borehole geophysics serve that workforce directly. At the same time its seismology and disaster-prediction committees serve earthquake science in a country where earthquakes are a recurring national emergency, and its geodesy and geomagnetism communities maintain the reference frames and observatory series on which navigation, mapping and space-weather services depend.

Why the Society matters

The Chinese Geophysical Society matters, on the documented record, for its combination of age, scale and reach. Founded in 1947 on nine subjects, publishing in English within a year, rebuilt in 1953 alongside the Academy's geophysics institute and based in Beijing since 1954, it has grown into a body of tens of thousands of members and some thirty committees whose subjects run from the Earth's core to other planets. Its journals carry Chinese geophysics in both languages, its data committees steward the field's information infrastructure, and its co-owned Geoscience Union meeting is the discipline's national congress. The essentials for the record are the August 1947 Shanghai inauguration, the nine founding subjects, the 1948 journal, the 1953 rebuilding under the Institute of Geophysics, the Beijing base under today's Institute of Geology and Geophysics, and a sponsorship spanning the Academy, the natural-resources and earthquake authorities and the national oil companies.