ANTARCTIC GEOLOGY

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29383, 9 December 1960, Page 19

ANTARCTIC GEOLOGY

French Professor To Make Study

With plans to make detailed studies of pebbles and sand grains and to carry out statistical surveys of rock veins in the Antarctic, a French professor of geology, Professor A. Cailleux, of the Sorbonne University, Paris, has arrived in' Christchurch to go to McMurdo Sound.

During the next two months he would be attached to the United States Antarctic expedition as a scientific observer, said Professor Cailleux yesterday. As the basic geological study of the continent was already being carried out by New Zealand and American geologists, he hoped to visit some of the areas where no intensive research had yet beAi done by these groups.

Some of the statistical research would be similar in pattern to that which he did in the Sahara a year ago, he said. In both these areas, where rocks were so sparsely covered in vegetation, geological study was particularly straight-forward.

Although he did some geological work in the Arctic after the war, it would be difficult to compare conditions there with those in the Antarctic as so much progress had taken place in geological research during these 12 years. One particular study in which French geological research was keenly Interested concerted certain strange frost actions which have been found to occur both in the Antarctic and in an area near Paris, he said. With a geological colleague from the University of Fairbanks in Alaska, who is already working in the Antarctic, he hoped to make further investigations Which might have a surprising bearing on previously held French geological theory.