Fifth Annual Geoscience Conference (School of Earth Sciences)

The School of Earth Sciences, Bahir Dar University held its Fifth Annual Geoscience conference under the theme of "Geoscience for Societal Development" on May 13, 2022. During the opening remark of the conference, Dr. Fenta Nigate (chair of the organizing committe) made a speech regarding the conference organizing committee and the overall schedule of the event, and he invited Dr. Minyahl Teferi, Director of the School of Earth Sciences. Dr. Minyahl addressed the overall achievements of the school of Earth Sciences (T-learning, research, and community services), and collaborations, and he finally welcomed the honorable/special guest of the conference, Dr. Firew Tegegn (President of Bahir Dar University). Dr. Firew in his wonderful speech emphasized the university's achievement, future university's focus areas, and exemplar achievements of the SES, and he finally wished a good stay for the guests at BDU and Bahir Dar city.

The School of Earth Sciences invited  Professor Gezahagn Yirgu, who is a well-known Volcanologist, from Addis Ababa University as a keynote speaker for this glorious conference. During the keynote speech, Professor Gezahagn gave a talk on "Gift of planet earth to Ethiopia: wealth and risk of sustainable development". The professor spoke a lot about the occurrences and Spatio-temporal distributions of the various treasures and wealth (groundwater, minerals, petroleum/natural gas, construction, and industrial materials) in the country. Together with this, there are various geohazards like volcanic processes, mass-wasting/landslide, flood, drought, and so on which can hinder the sustainable development of the country. He also mentioned the wise use of geological resources and time to think about the fate of our future generation. Professor of Gezahagn mentioned in his speech the limitation of experts in the field of geosciences who can map, quantify, plan, and extract the geo-resources we have.

After the welcome and keynote speeches, the presenters, both from SES (BDU) and other universities, presented their works. A total of 17 research works were presented during this conference (oral presentation: 14; poster presentation: 3 ). Most of the presenters' work is related to hydrogeology, geophysics, engineering geology,  petrology/geochemistry, structural geology, geohazards,  paleontology, etc. Finally, Dr. Minyahl gave a concluding remark of the fifth annual geoscience conference.