摘要
In late July 2007, some 1100 Quaternary scientists gathered for a week-long conference in the tropical city of Cairns in northeast Australia for the 17th quadrennial congress of the International Union for Quaternary Research （INQUA）. Conference presentations were on topics in such diverse fields as archaeology, stratigraphy, geomorphology, palaeontology, geochemistry, hydrology, climate change and geochronology. To an outsider, the unifying theme of an INQUA Congress may be difficult to grasp, but diversity has always been a characteristic of Quaternary research, more so than for any other major period of the geological time scale.
