LARGE LABORATORY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 78, Issue 7016, 7 February 1949, Page 7

LARGE LABORATORY

N.Z.’S SIGNIFICANCE IN PACIFIC SCIENCE CONGRESS STUDY OF NATURAL FORCES “The significance which New Zealand has for students of scientific problems of the Pacific is that these islands are in many respects a largescale laboratory in which may be studied processes which are affecting or moulding islands and continental coastlines in all parts of the great area with which the congress is concerned.” This was stated by the president of the Seventh Pacific Science Congress, Dr R. A. Falla, in a broadcast address recently. Describing the congress as a. great occasion, Dr Falla, said it obviously meant a good deal to New Zealand scientists, of whom there were now some thousands. The number who could make trips abroad was comparatively small; but at the congress the 200 visitors from overseas included many who were world authorities in their particular fields. The 300 New Zealanders who would discuss and exchange views with them included not only our own senior specialists, but many junior scientists as well, and even some students. The size of the overseas representation and its quality alone made the congress an outstanding event in the history of science in New Zealand.

What, Dr Falla asked, were the visitors going to get out of meetings m a small country with institutions and staffs a fraction the size, of those in lands from which they have come? In one sense the venue of a congress did not matter very much. Science and technology were developing so rapidly that any international congress afforded a valuable opportunity for _ the personal exchange of ideas, which had advantages not possessed by the slower exchange of publications. A congress programme also . provided some opportunity, for specialists in one line to see and hear something of what other kinds of specialists were doing. This was not at all a bad thing. Instancing the first section of the technical programme of the congress, on geophysics and geology, Dr Falla said it was headed “The Pacific Basin —structure and dynamics,” and went on to deal with such inter-related themes as the contours of the ocean floor, the origin and occurrence of earthquakes and the volcanoes of the Pacific region.

“These are subjects in which great advances in knowledge lately have been made,” Dr Falla said, “and in some of them the work already done in New Zealand is of great importance.”

Discussing results expected from the congress, Dr Falla said there were a number of problems of concern to everybody which could not be solved by the efforts of any one country. One problem that faced all was the conservation of natural resources. “We know how to conserve resources of which we can control the output, or supply, but we have much to learn in the conservation of nature,” Dr Falla said. “It is an urgent responsibility because the disappearance or violent disturbance of natural associations of minerals, plants and animals on land or in the sea is making our own existence and future precarious. In a symposium which is likely to be an important one the congress will discuss papers dealing with every aspect of this question. Scientists at work in many countries have learned to study animals in relation to plants, plant life in relation to soil; and they have recognised a distinct branch of biological science known as ecology which deals with organisms in relation to environment.”

An overseas ecologist had remarked that he had been amazed by the complexity of New Zealand’s problems in assessing the relative effects on vegetation and soil of a host of introduced mammals as diverse as deer, opossums, and rabbits, as well as a lot more. New Zealand knew hardly anything yet of the population trend's and cycles of each of them, and the points at which they were most vulnerable. These things must be known before control could be effective. The question was not an academic one; it was of vital importance to everybody. - Another field was the ocean environment of New Zealand’s islands, Dr Falla said. The largest unconfined expanse of ocean on the face of the globe had New Zealand near the middle, of it. The science of oceanography in which physicists, chemists, and biologists combined, was not yet 100 years old, but the oceans were being mapped and described vertically and horizontally with practical results for navigation and fisheries. If New Zealand ever became, as it should, a centre for oceanographical research, this congress would mark the beginning of it.