Seminar Series: Professor David Lowe
Using tephrochronology to synchronize and date records of late Quaternary environmental change in New Zealand
(NZ-INTIMATE project)
S PEAKER: Professor David Lowe
Seminar Coordinator: Dr Patrick Moss
Volcanic-ash layers, or tephras, provide a powerful stratigraphic tool for linking, dating, and synchronizing geological, palaeoenvironmental, or archaeological sequences or events. Such useage is referred to as tephrochronology. It involves characterizing or ‘fingerprinting’ tephra layers and obtaining numerical ages for them which can then be transferred using stratigraphy. David firstly will outline some of the recent techniques he and colleagues have used to characterise and date tephras, including Bayesian-based modelling, to help improve the chronology for the NZ-INTIMATE project.
David has undertaken research in Antarctica, Australia, British Columbia, Japan, and the UK as well as New Zealand. In Antarctica (1978-79) his party manhauled a sledge for six weeks in the Transantarctic Mountains and discovered rare iron meteorites. He spent 10 months on leave in Adelaide at CSIRO Soils Division in 1991-1992, and 8 months at Queen’s University Belfast and Plymouth University in 1998-1999.
In 2006 he spent time at Scion Forests and Environment (formerly Forest Research Institute) in Rotorua. His earlier professional work experience includes synthesizing benzene in the Waikato Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory and soil survey-related work for Soil Bureau, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Hamilton. David has been involved in the supervision of 50 PhD, masterate, or postgrad diploma students (chief supervisor for 24).
Date: Friday 23 October
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Professor David Lowe grew up on tephras in Tauranga on the east coast of North Island, New Zealand, before studying at the University of Waikato where he is now a professor in Earth sciences. He is a multidisciplinary geoscientist with interests in three fields: tephrochronology, the correlation of tephra (volcanic ash) deposits and their application to linking, synchronizing, and dating geological, palaeoecological or archaeological deposits or events; pedology, the origin, distribution and classification of soils (especially in volcanic terrains); and Quaternary science involving palaeoenvironmental reconstructions for the past 2.6 Ma. He has published around 114 refereed articles in scientific journals or books including 16 book chapters and two edited volumes of Quaternary International. A book on New Zealand’s geology and landscapes he helped to edit, A Continent on the Move, won the ‘environment’ category for the Montana NZ Book Awards this year.
David’s contributions to research have been recognised by awards both in New Zealand and overseas. In 2007 he was a keynote speaker at the international INQUA (Quaternary) conference in Cairns, Australia, and a plenary speaker at an international Quaternary conference in Tsukuba, Japan. He was an invited speaker at conferences in Japan in 2006 and 2004. In 2002 David was awarded both the N.H. Taylor Memorial Lecture Award and a Fellowship of the New Zealand Society of Soil Science. In 2000, he was an Invitation Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and in 1999 he participated in a Television New Zealand documentary on the Polynesian settlement of New Zealand (Who Was Here Before Us?). David is an associate editor for Soil Science Society of America Journal and on editorial boards of three other international journals (JQS, QI, NZJGG). He is secretary of INQUA’s International Focus Group of Tephrochronology and Volcanism (INTAV) and leads the new INTREPID project “Enhancing tephrochronology as a global research tool”. He is a member of the Australasian INTIMATE project “Integration of ice-core, marine, and terrestrial records”, and the SUPRAnet project “Studying uncertainty in palaeoenvironmental reconstruction” that began in the U.K. in 2008.
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