UIS-BULLETIN

The time from the last speleological congress in beautifull La Chaux-de-Fond, Switzerland in 1997, passed fast. According to the number of participants, the event was the greatest Congress since the beginning of that tradition in 1951, Paris, France. We spent 4 years of intensive caving and/or research, looking forward and thinking on the new Millenium and on the next meeting in 2001 in Brazil, for the first time on the Southern Hemisphere in South America. Our time was filled with lot of discoveries; we found karst and caves even in the centre of deserts, where the occurrence of caves was accepted only by crazy persons. Now we know lot on fantastic caves e.g., in Saudi Arabia and other regions of Arabian Penninsula. We improved our knowledge on tropical karsts, subterranean flooded world, on speleogensis, hydrothermal karst and on other aspects of caving and karstology, sometimes very special and specific. We push our knowledge on forms similar to karst also in other rocks, in salt, gypsum, sandstones, volcanic rocks, magmatites and metamorphics and even in ice. We contributed important data for deciphering and predicting global changes and evolution of past, modern and future climates and climatic trends. Speleothems represented one of the first objects for such analyses. Commissions and Working Groups have been pushing the limits of our knowledge up, we have to thank all of them. New discoveries and research results have been presented in numerous national and international conferences, symposia, workshops and meeting, in numerous cases during events having nothing common with karst research and speleology. The results o