Excursion

Introduction

Halong City is a town on the northern side of the Ha Long Bay Archipelago of Vietnam. It’s the capital of Vietnam’s Quang Ninh province, about 180 km from Hanoi, and is known as the northern tourist paradise. The name Ha Long means “descending dragon“. Thanks to its favorable location, modern infrastructure, and developed transportation system, Ha Long attracts tens of millions of domestic and international tourists annually.

Ha Long Bay or Halong Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and popular travel destination in Quang Ninh province. The bay has an area of 1,553 km2 with about 1,900 large and small limestone islands of very vivid shapes. The bay has been voted many times by UNESCO as a world natural wonder, and is known as a must-see place once in a lifetime.

Geologically, Ha Long bay has experienced at least 500 million years in various geological states of orogeny, marine transgression and marine regression. During the Ordovician and Silurian periods (500-410 million years ago), Hạ Long Bay was deep sea. During the Carboniferous and Permian periods (340-250 million years ago), Hạ Long Bay was at shallow sea level. The dominated uplift movement of neotectonic and recent tectonic activity deeply influenced this area, and the present landscape of sea-islands was formed around 7 or 8 thousand years ago by the sea invasion during the Holocene transgression, which began 17–18 thousand years ago.

Topographically, Ha Long bay is a mature karst landscape developed during a warm, wet, tropical climate. The sequence of stages in the evolution of a karst landscape over a period of 20 million years requires a combination of several distinct elements including a massive thickness of limestone, a hot wet climate and slow overall tectonic up lift.

One-Day Tour Itinerary

Beside the two-day technical program in Hanoi, the organizing committee (OC) also organizes one-day post-conference excursion tour to Ha Long bay on December 16, 2023 (see Schedule below) with the participation of the keynote speakers and many well-known scholars. The delegation would enjoy the Bay tour by a 5-star cruise. All attendees are cordially invited to join the tour at a very reasonable price. For details, please contact the Secretariat at support@geotechn.vn.