USA Blog
Studying Super-eruptions and Cancer-fighting Vegetables
Tuesday, 23 September 2008
The New Zealand government has allocated a $54 million pool of funding to a variety of scientific projects around the country as they announced this year's Marsden Fund Awards.
Professor Joel Baker, of Victoria University's School of Geography and Earth Sciences, will receive $940,000 over three years to study super-eruptions.
New Zealand has experienced at least four of the gigantic explosions. The most recent, 26,000 years ago, formed Lake Taupo. But Dr Baker said a larger eruption in the region more than a million years ago may have spewed a devastating pyroclastic explosion as far as what is now Auckland.
Pyroclastic flows are superheated clouds of volcanic ash that can move at more than 80kmh.
"Temperatures reach thousands of degrees and it incinerates everything in its path." Dr. Baker said.
Fortunately super-eruptions are rare events - there have been just 20 around the world in the past 30 million years.
The grant will enable Dr Baker and Professor Colin Wilson, of Auckland University, to complete field work, analyse samples at expensive laboratories in Britain and the United States, and support two postgraduate students.
Other projects include research into how molecules found in some foods could cure cancer and how the diet of the moa affected our ancient ecology.
The University of Otago received funding for projects that include studies into memory mechanisms in brain cells; the potency of immune system responses; geological processes in New Zealand mountains; historical migration into Australia and New Zealand; and planning and resource management by indigenous peoples.
Otago University psychologist Associate Prof Elaine Reese was awarded an $821,000 grant, spread over three years, to investigate how a sense of identity was formed and whether it is shaped the same way for adolescents in different cultures.
Share this article
Subscribe to this blog 