SURVEY OF OCEANS

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 265, 5 August 1929, Page 10

SURVEY OF OCEANS

STUDY IN THE PACIFIC In search of data for his books on the oceanography of the Pacific, Professor P. P. Gerhard Schott, oceanologist of the German Shipping Institute at Hamburg, left Wellington for New Plymouth on Saturday morning after conferring with the scientific officers of the Marine Department and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Professor Schott, who has already visited India, Japan, China, and Australia, is spending ten days in the Dominion studying its coastal waters and collecting specimens. Once a department of the German navy, the German Shipping Institute is now a department of commerce. It carries out work of world-wide importance in connection with meteorology, oceanography, and aerology. It also has a special department for dealing with the improvement of nautical instruments, and provides a very accurate time signal service. For Its meteorological work it has in the Atlantic no fewer than 64 specially equipped vessels, and It makes a feature of working up in full all. the meteorological data in the log of every German ship. Three vessels in the service are fully equipped for upper air observation, and Professor Schott has offered to lend one of their special sextants used for this work to Mr. R. G. Simmers, of the New Zealand Meteorological Office, during the Mawson Antarctic expedition, an offer which has been gratefully accepted.