Pollen Scientist Returns

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30586, 31 October 1964, Page 1

Pollen Scientist Returns

Continued research in the late glacial history of the New Zealand flora is planned by Dr. N. T. Moar, of the Botany Division, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Lincoln, who has just returned to New Zealand after three years and a half on extended study leave in the Botany School of Cambridge University. Dr. Moar’s work overseas :has been on the history of the vegetation of the late I glacial period in Scotland. I His main technique is pollen

analysis (palynology), in which the identity and frequency of the plants which occupied an area during a past period are assessed through identifying and counting fossil pollen-grains trapped in lake or swamp deposits of the time. Dr. Moar had been carrying out similar research in New Zealand before he left, but the time he spent in Britain, he said yesterday, helped him enormously in planning his further attack on problems here. Before he could take up his own research in New Zealand again fully, however, he would have I to become fully conversant [with the considerable i advances made by New Zealand botanists and geologists [while he was away. I At Cambridge, Dr. Moar

worked under Professor H. Godwin in the sub-depart-ment of quaternary research. He gained his doctorate there. Dr. Moar also made contact [with experts in other countries of Europe, including Dr. J. J. Donner of the University of Helsinki, who accompanied him on a field trip in Finland, and Dr. J. Iversen, of the palynological laboratory of the State Geological Surrey of Denmark. He spent three weeks in the Abisko National Park of Swedish Lapland to gain an idea of what the vegetation of Britain might have looked like |in the late glacial period. He also visited laboratories in [Paris, and in Warsaw where Ihe attended an international [conference of geology on the i Quaternary Period.