33 EXPEDITIONS BY BRITONS

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29178, 12 April 1960, Page 22

33 EXPEDITIONS BY BRITONS

Visits To Many *-,Areasln tWX Prow AMociation-Copvriffht) LONDON, April 10. From the Himalayas to the Andes, from the West Indies to Africa, 33 British expeditions will venture this year in the search for knowledge and the Society, announcing that It had approved the expeditious, said many of them would be to mountain regions, mainly in the Andes . and the Himalayas. . > Each year the society, which came into existence in 1830, supports a large number of expeditions, mostly composed of young people, both men and women, from the universities wishing to carry out exploratory and scientific work overseas. The regions to be visited by the various expeditions include the West Indies, Persia, the Arctic,, North and West Africa, British Guiana, Ecuador, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Switzerland, Afghanistan, Turkey, Nepal, the Himalayas and Karakoram, and Patagonia.

Two of the expeditions, the one to Patagonia by Mr Eric Shipton, the famous British mountaineer who made a reconnaissance of Everest in 1951, and the other, the British-Indian-Nepalese services expedition to the Himalayas, are already in the field. These last two are senior expeditions like the projected British-American expedition to the Karakoram by Mr Wilfrid Noyce, a member of the successful Everest expedition of 1953. This will attempt the ascent of a 25,000 ft peak and will carry out mapping and survey in co-opera-tion with Pakistan's Department of Survey. Another expedition of this kind is the Saltoro expedition in the Karakoram which will be led by Dr. John Stephenson, a geologist who was a member of Sir Vivian Fuchs’s party on the Commonwealth transantarctic expedition. The scientific work to be carried out by the university expeditions, in geography, geology, mapping, and survey, aoology, botany, and other fields, covers a wide range. The Imperial College expedition to St. Kitts, West Indies, will, for example, search for the “mountain chicken,” a large species of frog which has been thought to be extinct. . An Oxford women’s expedition to the Azores will make a land use survey of the Island of Faial. An expedition from Wye Agricultural College to Morocco will carry out an agricultural survey.