American Geophysical Union

• 1. Introduction

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  The American Geophysical Union says its community includes 130,000 people, and its own website is careful to add that they are not all members. That small hedge says a lot about the organization. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that gathers Earth, atmospheric, ocean, hydrologic, space, and planetary scientists, along with enthusiasts who simply love the subject. Its headquarters sits on Florida Avenue in Washington, D.C. The mission is to organize and spread scientific knowledge across the Earth and space sciences. Geophysics, as the union frames it, rests on four pillars: atmospheric and ocean sciences, solid-Earth sciences, hydrologic sciences, and space sciences. How did a small group of scientists end up with such a sprawling territory? Who runs it, and who gets honored by it? And what happens when an organization devoted to evidence has to decide whom to take money from, whom to discipline, and what to say about a warming planet?

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• 2. Borderlands

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  In March 1919, a committee chaired by Robert S. Woodward of the Carnegie Institution produced a report that described geophysics as a set of borderlands. These were closely related subjects that depend on one another: astronomy, geodesy, geology, meteorology, oceanography, seismology, terrestrial magnetism, terrestrial electricity, tides, and volcanology.

  That definition shaped the organization that followed. The National Research Council established the union in December 1919 so that the United States would have a representative in the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics. Its first chairman was William Bowie of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. The aim was "pure" geophysics. Exploration geophysics, the hunt for resources underground, already had its own home in the Society of Exploration Geophysicists.

  The union began with seven sections: Geodesy, Seismology, Meteorology, Terrestrial magnetism and electricity, Oceanography, Volcanology, and Geophysical chemistry. Hydrology joined them in 1930. Tectonophysics arrived in 1940, and Norman Bowen, who suggested the name, wanted it to "designate this new borderline field between geophysics, physics and geology for the solution of problems of tectonics."

  Today the structure has grown to 25 sections. Some, such as cryosphere sciences, geohealth, and the study of the Earth's deep interior, would have been hard to imagine on a list from 1919. Those sections now organize volunteers, develop leaders, and decide whom to honor.

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• 3. Members and Leaders

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  Twenty-five members attended the first meeting, held on the 23rd of April 1920. For its first decade, membership was capped and by election only. Dues did not exist until 1932.

  Once the doors widened, growth was steady. Membership reached 4,600 in 1950, then 13,000 in 1980 and 26,000 in 1990. By 2018 the count stood at 62,000 members from 137 countries. For more than 50 years the union had no legal identity of its own, operating as an unincorporated affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences. It was incorporated in the District of Columbia on the 29th of June 1972, and membership opened to scientists and students worldwide.

  The scientific face of the union is its president. More than 40 people have held that role, among them Maurice Ewing, James Van Allen, and Marcia McNutt. William Bowie served two separate terms, the first from 1920 to 1922 and the second from 1929 to 1932. Brandon Jones took office in 2025.

  Day-to-day operations fell to a different line of leaders. John Adam Fleming became Secretary in 1925, later renaming the job General Secretary, and he worked as a volunteer while employed at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. By 1943 membership was nearing 2,000, and the union decided it needed a full-time administrator. Waldo E. Smith was hired as Executive Secretary and stayed until 1970. Athelstan Spilhaus, Jr. followed as executive director, and Christine McEntee replaced him in 2010. By 2021 the leadership team included a CEO, 4 executive vice presidents, 6 vice presidents, 7 directors, and a chief digital officer.

  Both Fleming and Smith have medals named for them, which brings the story to the way the union honors its own.

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• 4. The Published Record

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  A single identifier, 10.1029/2001GL014304, shows how the union reinvented its publishing. It has four parts: the publisher code 10.1029, the year 2001, the journal code GL, and an article number, 014304. That digital object identifier replaced the old habit of numbering pages in sequence.

  The road to that system began in 1997, when the union co-published its first electronic journal, Earth Interactions, with the American Meteorological Society and the Association of American Geographers. In December 1999 it launched its own electronic title, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. By 2001 it had switched fully to electronic publishing, and the online version became the publication of record for every journal.

  Libraries and scientists complained. A number with no page sequence gave librarians nothing to use when locating an article in print, and even scientific databases were not built to handle these identifiers. Officials called the trouble a temporary cost of being first, but they still went back and gave every article a four-digit article number.

  The catalogue itself is large. Beyond the magazine Eos, the union publishes more than twenty peer-reviewed journals, including Geophysical Research Letters, Water Resources Research, and the seven-part Journal of Geophysical Research, which spans space physics, solid Earth, oceans, atmospheres, planets, Earth surface, and biogeosciences. By 2010, Paleoceanography had the highest impact factor in paleontology, and Reviews of Geophysics ranked second in geochemistry and geophysics. The union has also published books for more than 85 years and partners with groups such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the European Geosciences Union on shared titles. Some journals are open access from the start. The rest open to everyone after a rolling two-year delay. In 2012, more than one and a half million pages of legacy content moved to the Wiley Online Library, and John Wiley & Sons won the IT Project Team of the Year Award at the 2013 UK IT Industry Awards for the work.

  Copyright protects all of it, and one corporate library tested the limits. Texaco's library made systematic copies of journal articles for its own collection, so the union and five other publishers took the company to court. The judges found for the union. Texaco was fined and agreed to buy a license retroactively from the Copyright Clearance Center.

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• 5. Names on the Medals

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  The William Bowie Medal is the highest honor the union gives, and its namesake received it first, in 1939. It recognizes "outstanding contributions to fundamental geophysics and for unselfish cooperation in research." The final phrase, unselfish cooperation in research, is the union's motto.

  Many other medals carry the names of scientists whose work defined a field. The Inge Lehmann Medal honors the discoverer of the Earth's inner core. The Harry H. Hess Medal remembers a pioneer in the study of the oceanic lithosphere. The Roger Revelle Medal is named for an oceanographer known for his contribution to understanding global change. The Joanne Simpson Medal, established in 2017, honors the first woman in the United States to receive a PhD in meteorology and goes to a mid-career scientist. The James B. Macelwane Medal, named for a former president who cared deeply about teaching young scientists, goes to scientists no more than 10 years past their highest degree.

  The awards reach beyond the laboratory. The David Perlman Award is named for a science editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism is named for a science writer of The New York Times. The Robert C. Cowen Award recalls a long-time editor of The Christian Science Monitor. The Athelstan Spilhaus Award honors a man who created the bathythermograph and also drew a long-running science cartoon. The Charles S. Falkenberg Award goes to a scientist under 45, and Falkenberg himself applied data visualization to the Earth sciences.

  Since 2015 two Africa Awards have recognized early career scientists from that continent, one in Earth or ocean sciences and one in space science. The Ambassador Award, established in 2013, has an unusual perk. It is the only award whose recipients become AGU Fellows. Fellowship is otherwise tightly rationed, since no more than 0.1% of the membership can be elected in a given year.

  Students have their own track. Judges score oral and poster presentations at meetings, and typically the top 2-5% of presenters in each section win an Outstanding Student Presentation Award.

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• 6. The Fall Meeting

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  Every December, the union holds its Fall Meeting, which drew more than 25,000 attendees in 2018. Until 2017 it met in San Francisco every year. Renovations at the venue sent it to New Orleans in 2017 and to Washington, DC in 2018. It returned to San Francisco in 2019, and the location now rotates among San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, and Washington, DC.

  There was once a second gathering each spring, running from April into May. For years it met in Baltimore. Declining interest pushed the union to try other places, beginning with Boston in 1998. After the 2003 meeting in Nice, France, it was called the Joint Assembly, since partners such as the Geochemical Society, the Mineralogical Society of America, the Canadian Geophysical Union, and the European Geosciences Union co-sponsored it. In 2017 the union also held its first joint meeting with the Japan Geoscience Union, in Chiba, Japan. Smaller formats exist too. The Ocean Sciences Meeting takes place in even-numbered years, and the Chapman Conferences are small and tightly focused.

  A meeting of Earth scientists has an Earth-sized footprint. The 9500 participants at the 2002 meeting traveled an average of 8,000 km, which produced an estimated 1.3 metric tons of carbon dioxide, about one-sixteenth of average yearly emissions for Americans. Shuttle bus drivers were asked to switch off their engines while parked, but 95% of the emissions came from jet fuel. David Scott and Lawrence Plug of Dalhousie University estimated in an unpublished study that moving the meeting to Denver, Colorado could cut emissions by 7.7%.

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• 7. A Public Voice

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  In December 1998, the union's Council adopted its first position statement on climate change. It said that rising greenhouse gas concentrations from fossil fuel combustion and other human activities would persist for as long as thousands of years. It called present understanding a "compelling basis for legitimate public concern." After weighing the scientific uncertainties, it concluded that they did not "justify inaction" in curbing human-induced climate change or adapting to it. A detailed supporting document backed the statement, and it was most recently revised and reaffirmed in 2012.

  The Council has also spoken on biological evolution, natural hazards, and science education and funding. In 2014 the union created the Sharing Science program, offering workshops, resources, and hands-on support so scientists can talk with journalists, educators, students, policy makers, and the broader public.

  Speaking up carries risk. Michael Mann, a union Fellow and lead author of the original "hockey stick graph" study, faced a demand from Virginia attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli II to hand over his private emails. The court rejected the demand. Because such challenges continue, the union partnered in 2012 with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund to offer legal counseling at the Fall Meeting.

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• 8. Lines Drawn

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  On the 16th of February 2012, Peter Gleick resigned as chairman of the union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics. The group had been created in 2011 to review and update policies for dealing with scientific misconduct. Gleick, a climate scientist and MacArthur Fellow, announced that he had lied to obtain internal documents from the Heartland Institute and then leaked them. He cited frustration with attacks on climate science and called it a serious lapse of judgement. Linda Gundersen, director of the Office of Science Quality and Integrity at the United States Geological Survey, took his place.

  A broader reform followed. In 2017 the union adopted an updated ethics policy, the AGU Scientific Integrity and Professional Ethics, which added harassment, bullying, and discrimination to its definition of misconduct. It grew partly out of a 2016 workshop on sexual and gender-based harassment, co-sponsored by groups including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Earth Science Women's Network. Staff are trained to handle incidents at the annual meeting and wear "Safe AGU" buttons. On the 27th of February 2018, CEO Chris McEntee testified before a House subcommittee hearing on sexual harassment and misconduct in science. In July 2019 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded the union a three-year grant for the AGU Ethics and Equity Initiative, run with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  The rules were tested in December 2022, when climate scientists Rose Abramoff and Peter Kalmus interrupted a plenary session of the Fall Meeting with a call for scientists to protest. The union removed their presentations, banned them from participating, opened a misconduct inquiry, and complained to Abramoff's employer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The two scientists also claimed the union threatened to have them arrested if they returned. Oak Ridge fired Abramoff in January 2023.

  Money drew its own controversy. In 2014 the union accepted 5469 gifts, grants, and pledges. Its 1919 Society, for gifts above $100,000, included ExxonMobil, and the company also supported an annual Student Breakfast. Amazon Web Services backed research grants with cloud computing access. In 2015 the Board approved a policy requiring partners to advance the union's mission and be vetted against "false misinterpretations of science."

  Members worried about ExxonMobil after evidence surfaced that the company had known about climate change for decades while working to undermine climate science. On the 22nd of February 2016, a letter signed by 100 scientists asked the union to cut ties. On the 22nd of April 2016, the Board voted to keep the sponsorship. It said the evidence of ongoing misinformation was not unequivocal and preferred long-term engagement with the energy industry. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Ted Lieu wrote a critical letter, and the Union of Concerned Scientists urged a rethink, but on the 23rd of September 2016 the Board held its position.

  A different decision came in November 2021, when a video presentation announced that the union held no direct investments in fossil-fuel companies and had begun divesting mutual fund holdings in them.

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