The international tephra research group ‘Commission on Tephrochronology’ and its activities – the first 60 years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Modern tephra studies per se began almost 100 years ago (in the late 1920s) but the first collective of tephrochronologists, with a common purpose and nascent global outlook, was not formed until 7 September, 1961, in Warsaw, Poland. On that date, the inaugural ‘Commission on Tephrochronology’ (COT) was ratified under the aegis of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA). COT’s formation can be attributed largely to the leadership of Kunio Kobayashi of Japan, the commission’s president for its first 12 years. We were motivated to record COT’s heritage for posterity and also because the discipline of tephrochronology, including the study of cryptotephras, continues to grow globally at a significant rate. This is recognition of tephrochronology as both a unique correlational and age-equivalent dating method, and as a complementary method in other fields, such as volcanology, in which tephra research has been employed to develop eruption histories and hazards and to help understand volcano-climate interactions. In this article, we review the history of COT (which also functioned under other names, abbreviated as COTS, CEV, ICCT, COTAV, SCOTAV, INTAV) under the umbrella of INQUA for 53 of the last 60 years, or under IAVCEI (International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior) for seven of the last 60 years, including since 2019. We describe the development of the commission and its subsequent activities that include organising nine specialist tephra-field meetings in seven different countries, numerous conference sessions or workshops, and generating tephra-themed issues of journals/books or specialist internet documents or websites. The commission began to prosper after 1987 when key changes occurred, and it has blossomed further, especially in the past decade or so as an entire new cohort of specialists has emerged alongside new analytical and dating techniques to become a vibrant global group today. We name 29 elected officers involved with COT since 1961 and their roles, and 15 honorary life members. We also document the aims of the commission and conclude by evaluating its legacies and current and future work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".