The Quaternary history of vegetation in the South Atlantic islands

My contribution to the exploration of the southern temperate zone is the pollenanalytical investigation of a number of peat cores, collected by Dr Christophersen, the leader of the Norwegian scientific expedition to Tristan da Cunha 1937/38, and by Mr N. M. Wace, the botanist on the British Gough Island survey 1955/56. I am most grateful to these explorers, especially to Mr Wace, for placing this valuable material at my disposal. Since von Post, on receiving the Vega medal in 1944, gave his famous lecture ‘The prospect for pollen analysis in the study of the earth’s climatic history’ (published in English in 1946), a number of pollen-analytical investigations have been carried out in the Southern Hemisphere. In extreme South America, especially by Auer; in New Zealand, by Cranwell-Smith, Deevey, Harris, Moar, Moore and others; in Australia, by Cookson, Duigan and others; in South Africa, by van Zinderen Bakker, Coetzee, Martin and others; and also in some of the isolated islands around the Antarctic continent.