Download Into and out of the last ice age: new pollen records of climate change

Quaternary Environments Research Group
Postgraduate project
Into and out of the last ice age: new pollen records of climate
change from Southern New Zealand
Louise Callard
PhD advisors : Professor Rewi Newnham, Dr Ralph Fyfe
Collaborator: Dr Marcus Vandergoes, Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, Lower
Hutt, Wellington
This study aims to determine the timing and characteristics of climate changes leading up to,
during, and following the period of last major ice advance at new sites in New Zealand.
Funded by a faculty scholarship at University of Plymouth, this project has been established
in collaboration with partners at New Zealand’s Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences
(IGNS) as part of a wider investigation into Late Quaternary climate in New Zealand. Our
primary objective for the Plymouth PhD project is to develop high-resolution pollen and
sedimentological records at 3 sites from southern New Zealand. Other work with
collaborators at IGNS will include glacial geomorphic mapping and further palaeoecological
and sedimentological analyses at these and similar sites.
The results will be used to test a preliminary scheme of climate events for the period 30 – 8
ka, determined recently from previous work by the New Zealand INTIMATE (Integration of
Ice, Marine and Terrestrial records) project (Alloway et al., 2007; see also
http://www.paleoclimate.org.nz/images/poster_sm.jpg). This preliminary scheme suggests
that climate events in New Zealand, and by inference elsewhere in the Southern
Hemisphere, were not always in phase with Northern Hemisphere patterns as was
previously thought; rather, it lends some support to an asynchronous model of interhemispheric climate change, driven primarily by changes in ocean heat transfer between
hemispheres and which seems to be reflected in comparisons between Greenland and
Antarctic ice core records. Nevertheless, the extent to which the pattern of climate change
depicted in Antarctica is manifested across the Southern Hemisphere is not yet clear.
Franz Joseph Glacier, Westland, New Zealand
(Photo M. Vandergoes)
1
Lake Matheson, Westland, New Zealand
(Photo M. Vandergoes)
Manks Tarn - sample site 1
2