Students Make Field Trips During Vacation

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30130, 14 May 1963, Page 12

Students Make Field Trips During Vacation

More than 120 students from Canterbury University will take part in field trips as part of their year’s studies during the May vacation Trips have been organised by the departments of botany, zoology, geography and geology. Work to be done by the geology department will include the use of the new bagnetometer, one of the first to be owned by a New Zealand geology department. Earlier models of this equipment were used in Otago to locate underground gutters of gold-bearing gravel, and it has important economic significance in such things as tracing iron-sand deposits The equipment measures the total magnetic field of an area in a much more exact manner than was previously possible. Advanced geology students will use the equipment to trace large intrusions of igneous rock in the Broken river area, and Dr. M J Frost, senior lecturer in the department, hopes to use it K trace meteorite particles and their effects in the Oxford area.

Another party of students is spending this week on a trip to Redcliffs Gully in the

RaKaia district, camping out in shearers’ quarters while they, continue their field work. Thirty geography students, under the guidance of Professor R. S. Waters and Dr M. McCaskill, are making a bus tour of the Nelson area, ‘udying the general geogra--11 y of the district, with particular emphasis on urban and rural land use.

The party has arranged to stay in local schools on their trip which will lest until next Sunday. The university's field stat ,n and laboratory at Cass will be the holiday workshop for 34 botany department stodents. They will make the trip in three sections, two groups of 20 stage II students and one group of 14 stage 111 students.

The stage II parties will make collections and studies of lower plant groups, while the stag- tn group will study riant ecology of the region Professor W. R. Philipson will accompany the group. The zoology department’s field station and laboratory at Kaikoura will be visited by two groups of sixteen stage 111 students making studies in marine ecology Each course will occupy a full week.