Tuesday 14 February 2017

Loess Letter [0110-7658]

Some notes on Loess Letter. LL was founded in 1979, at the New Zealand Soil Bureau in Lower Hutt, just north of Wellington, in the North Island of New Zealand. It was the newsletter of the newly launched Western Pacific Working Group of the Loess Commission of the International Union for Quaternary Research INQUA. At the full-scale INQUA meeting in Birmingham UK in 1977 the Loess Commission had passed from the charge of Julius Fink to Marton Pecsi. MP wanted to enlarge the scope of the Commission, and this chimed nicely with the proposal of Jim Bowler of ANU for a Working Group to concentrate on research in China, Australia and New Zealand.

The WPWG was properly constituted at a meeting of the Australia and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science ANZAAS in Auckland in January 1979. There was to be an initial field meeting in Australia, and the NZ contingent would produce a newsletter for the group. Large efforts would be made to involve  Chinese scholars in the enterprise. And in fact Liu Tung sheng visited the Soil Bureau in 1980, to discuss matters loessic and to set his seal of approval on the undertaking. He wrote a title for Loess Letter- which it carried proudly:

No comments:

Post a Comment