The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 363 Post Cruise Meeting was held in Qingdao on June 17-20, 2019. The meeting was organized by the First Institute of Oceanography of the Ministry of Natural Resources (FIO, MNR) and the IODP China Office. Li Tiegang, a research scientist and head of FIO, and Prof. Yair Rosenthal of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, attended the opening ceremony and delivered speeches. More than 50 scientists from China, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Poland and the Philippines attended the meeting.

During the 4-day meeting, based on the data of 9 core profiles in northwest Australia, Papua New Guinea's Manus Basin and Eauripik Rise in the Pacific Ocean acquired on the IODP Expedition 363, experts had in-depth discussions about several science subjects, such as the formation and evolution of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool, the global monsoon system and the process of Indo-Pacific material and energy exchange. The experts also decided the next key research directions in each area. This meeting promotes the cooperation between China and IODP, thus helping FIO to further engage in IODP.

The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) is the largest and most influential international cooperative research program in the history of geoscience. Guided by the idea of "Earth System Science", IODP plans to break through the ocean crust, reveal the seismic mechanism, identify the abyssal benthic deep subsurface biosphere and natural gas hydrates, understand extreme climate and the process of rapid climate change. It also plans to build a new-century earth system science research platform for international academic communities and serve the aims of environment prediction, earthquake prevention and disaster mitigation. Over 300 expeditions had been organized by IODP.

The IODP Expedition 363 (Western Pacific Warm Pool) was conducted from September to November 2016. Drilling in the Western Pacific, the following researches were done during the Expedition: the Western Pacific Warm Pool's influence on and response to millennial-scale climate change since the late Quaternary Period; changes of the Western Pacific Warm Pool on the orbital-scale and its relationship with monsoon activities from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene; the change of the Indonesian Throughflow from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene; the temperature of the surface water and intermediate water of the Western Pacific Warm Pool and the secular evolution of its aquatic chemical since the Middle Miocene, etc.