The university in the field

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33779, 27 February 1975, Page 9

The university in the field

The boundaries of the University of Canterbury go far beyond its 14 o-acre campus at Ilarn. It also has nine field stations stretching from coast to coast of the South Island and as far south as the Antarctic.

The first of the stations, a biological station at Cass, was established in 1914 and has been an important centre for teaching and research in biology, geology, agriculture and geography ever since. Among the researches published and in thesis form from the Cass area, 45 have been botanical, 47 zoological, four agricultural, seven geological and 10 geographical. Regular field trips in these disciplines are made to the Cass station, which is being extended to accommodate more students. In 1951 the Physics Department opened its first

upper atmosphere research station at Roiieston and has concentrated on research on radio-meteor trails and the measurement of upper atmosphere winds using meteor trails. The department also has a station at Birdlings Flat, at which the principal line of research is the motion and electrical properties of the atmosphere between altitudes of 60 and 300 milometres. The Zoology Department administers the Edward Percival Marine Laboratory at Kaikoura where there is accommodation for up to 32 staff and students for teaching courses and for

research activities, which at present include intertidal ecology, the biology of inter-tidal invertebrates, fisheries biology and the biology of bull kelp. Research facilities at the station, which was opened in 1963, include a library, circulating sea water, and a reference collection of marine flora and fauna. The Zoology Department has also established a small station on the subantarctic Snares Island with accommodation for four persons and it has summer accommodation for another four persons at Cape Bird, Antactica. A geology field station

was established in Westport in 1965 by converting a former house. The station has accommodation for 20 staff and students and is used regularly as a base for field work by geology students and for graduate research as well as by other disciplines. Buller offers a much wider range of possibilities for field study and research in geology than is available on the Canterbury side of the Southern Alps. In conjunction with the Universities of Pennsylvania and Florida, the University operates a major astromical observatory on the top of Mount John, Tekapo, 1000 feet above the waters of the

lake. The site was chosen after exhautive surveys showed that there were more clear nights there than in other parts of the country. Opened in a snowstorm in 1965; the observatory has attracted astono-' mers from several coun- j tries and considerable research on eclipsing binary stars has been undertaken there. The observatory also produced the “Canterbury Sky Atlas,” an atlas of the stars of the southern sky. Last year the Charles Foweraker field station ofthe School of Forestry wasopened at Harihari. It provides accommodation for up to 34 students and staffduring practical courses j and research in the podocarp and hardwood forests of the district.