05 - Lost In November

Backseat

Richard West interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of British Science, British Library, catalogue reference C1379/34/14. © British Library Board.

In this clip, botanist and geologist Richard West is speaking of research, conducted in retirement, on the environmental history of the area around Beachamwell in West Norfolk.  For further details see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FwJhCWR30M 

Transcript:
They see somebody wandering around like this on a nice day and there they are sweating away in a field and they think, you’re a lucky – you’re a lucky person, having a job like that, you know. And I can understand – well that’s a very rational feeling [laughs]. And [pause] it’s a very lonely job, driving a tractor, and boring as well, and so quite often they're quite pleased to talk to people and you explain what you’re doing. And I often say, when I’m talking in the field, that I really don’t like being inside and I prefer to be outside. And they all appreciate that point ‘cause they’re doing the same. And they can be – they – I mean, a particular one that's helped me a lot in Beachamwell is a chap called Robert Boughen, who works for a farm there and he’s a very observant person and he’s lived in the village all of his life. And he – he notices things. He knew I was interested in stripes and there was a wheat field coming up. It was – I should say it was within a few weeks of ripening. And he said, ‘There are stripes there in that green field.’ And I hadn’t seen that at all [laughs]. And when I looked closely he was right, there were stripes there. And he knew the distribution of the gravel, for example, and the size of the flints which occurred. He is a very observant person. And he – I’ve sent him stuff on the geology of his area. But on the whole people are very ready to talk to you […] I always ask them how they’re doing as well. And I've learnt quite a lot about the pig industry, which I didn’t know before [laughs].



Richard West on relations with farm workers in the field in Norfolk

Richard West interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of British Science, British Library, catalogue reference C1379/34/14. © British Library Board.

In this clip, botanist and geologist Richard West is speaking of research, conducted in retirement, on the environmental history of the area around Beachamwell in West Norfolk.  For further details see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FwJhCWR30M 

Transcript: 
Interviewer: What has been the effect of not having access to […] university equipment or-?

Richard: It’s made no difference at all to me [laughs]. I can do all this at very low cost. I don’t need a grant. I can do it all at home. I call it 'kitchen science'. Of course, when it’s published I may be subject to ribald humour, I don’t know. I’ve got to see a proper sedimentologist just to make quite sure I’m not dropping huge bricks on sedimentology. I don’t think I am. I think I can work out how much sand was deposited on the Breckland during one year with all these lake sediments. [pause] No, I think normally if you’re in post you’re – so much of your university time is taken up with committee work, going to meetings, teaching, trying to get money for research, but I can do all the things I need to do with the aid of a low power microscope and these measuring cylinders, sorting out sediment.




Richard West on low-tech environmental research in retirement

Ian Newton interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of Farming, Land Management and Conservation in Post-War Britain, British Library, catalogue reference C1828/05/05. © British Library Board.

Transcript:

Ian: From every egg we could measure organochlorine pollutants, and then we were able to relate those to eggshell thickness because one of the – at that time – known effects of DDT was to cause eggshell thinning, and we could also relate the pesticide residues in the egg to the success of particular clutches, you know, which would produce – a sparrowhawk lays anything up to six eggs in a clutch and only a proportion of those will – in a pesticide affected population – will normally hatch and the others won’t. So you’re able to relate pesticide levels to the number of young or proportion of eggs that produce young, that sort of thing. So that gave us quantitative measures of the impact of different pesticide concentration on sparrowhawk breeding success, which was pretty unique data at that time.

Interviewer: In the more intensively farmed Annandale [in Scotland], what were the other effects on the sparrowhawks of farming practice aside from chemicals?

Ian: Well over the years it was a progressive reduction in sparrowhawk prey species, because as farming became more intense the common songbirds of farmland declined fairly drastically, and so that was removing the food supply from sparrowhawks. Because although sparrowhawks nest in woodland and forest, they do part of their hunting or much of their hunting in the open countryside in the fields and hedgerows and so on, that’s where they catch their prey, and those prey are contaminated and declining in numbers.

Interviewer: Did you see these changes while you were working on this?

Ian: Yes I did, in the ten years we did in Annandale together, certain prey species almost disappeared from the diet. The most obvious one that I remember was lapwing, which was a common prey in the early years, it was a really abundant bird in the area, but then there was widespread land drainage through the 1970s. I think there was a very big subsidy on land drainage for farmers and most of the area and most of the Annan valley was drained at that time, and that caused a big crash in populations of lapwings and other waders, and that was reflected in sparrowhawk diets. We were getting very few if any lapwings towards the end of the ten year period. That land drainage, like many other changes on farmland, were considered important to the nation’s food production and any side effect on nature was trivial, it was just something we had to put up with; the nation needed more food. That was the attitude at that time. And the same was true for pesticides; the nature conservancy did use the data very extensively to argue for the phasing out of organochlorines and introduction of other pesticides instead. That did eventually happen, but only after a lot of damage had been done.


Ian Newton describes the effects of modern farming on wild birds

James Lovelock interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of British Science, British Library, catalogue reference C1379/15/05. © Estate of James Lovelock.  

Transcript: 

Interviewer: And when you first had designed this Electron Capture Detector, and you were – you used it to measure air samples, what sorts of chemicals were you looking for?

James: Ah well, it was, that leads back. When I was in Bowerchalke [in Wiltshire] first, way back in the 1950s, I noticed that in the summer the air was unusually hazy whenever it blew from Europe. And I got so interested I got – when I was over in America and visiting the National Centre for Atmospheric Research at Boulder – I got the scientists there interested and they gave me what was called a sun photometer, which is an instrument you can measure the haziness by looking at how much sunlight’s absorbed by it. And my family and myself kept a record of the haziness all of the time. And then I kept on wondering where the hell is this haze coming from, what’s the source? And you couldn’t just say, ‘Well it’s coming with the easterly wind off Europe, so it must be industrial pollution,’ because it might have been coming out of the sea or out of the land or anything like that. And I thought well what compound could there be that comes from big cities, where people are, that is not anywhere found in nature? And it didn’t take me long to think CFCs. They’re in every refrigerator, and at that time people were using them in spray cans and they were being poured into the air all the time, albeit in very low levels. Now it would mean detecting them at the parts per trillion level; could I do this? Yes, duck soup with the Electron Capture Detector. So I started measuring haze and the presence of CFC-11, which was the easy one to detect, simultaneously. And soon found a strong correlation, whenever the haze comes, then the CFCs rose steeply in the air to a much higher concentration, about three times greater than in the clear air.


James Lovelock on measuring CFCs with his Electron Capture Detector

Joseph Farman interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of British Science, British Library, catalogue reference C1379/07/15. © British Library Board.

Transcript: 

Interviewer: If we can return to your story at the point we left it, which was just at the time in the early ‘80s when you were beginning to receive back from Halley Bay and Argentine Islands, low results for ozone levels in the spring.  Could I ask you to tell the story of your memory of beginning to receive those low results?

Joseph: [Laughs] Yes, you make it sound as if we had nothing else to do. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. And the two co-authors of the paper, their job was to keep an eye on things as they came in, and so actually I heard about this a little bit late. And my first reaction, as anyone should be in essence, is if your observations of ozone start to change you should be – the first question you should ask is, ‘Has something gone wrong with the instrument?’ And so you have to go through all the procedure of the calibrations and comparisons and so on and so forth, and convince yourself that it’s not the instrument, or the people operating it, but that it’s actually something real. By the time this was sorted out the sort of next lot of observations we looked at just had got considerably lower. And it was then fairly obvious that you had to believe it or not, and if you believed it you had to publish it pretty quickly ‘cause it was fairly clearly important.  


Joseph Farman on the first signs of an ozone hole over Antarctica

Nigel Bell interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of British Science, British Library, catalogue reference C1379/91/06. © British Library Board. 

Transcript:

I mentioned how it began in – this Swede looking, Svante Odén looking at, yeah. Yeah, I mean he did a retrospective study in the early ‘70s of a – of the data from a network of rain gauges which had been put out over Norway and Sweden, in – sometime in the early ‘50s I think. The rain was becoming more acid over the years, and the acidity was penetrating deeper and deeper along the line of the prevailing wind into Scandinavia.  The other thing that became apparent is in the southern parts of Norway, in the mountains, and then in certain parts of Sweden, particularly Skåne, that there the lakes were becoming acid. As they became acid, they became fishless basically, salmon and trout being particularly badly affected, and really important to sports fish there.  Because I remember on the Acid Rain Enquiry we went to a small mansion which was owned by a shipping magnate, outside Kristiansand on the Tovdal River, which had gone acid and there hadn’t been a fish pulled out of it for ten years.  Whereas we were shown the data from two Yorkshiremen, one of whom was called Harold Wilson, which we thought quite funny, who used to go there in the, you know, for a holiday in the ‘20s and sort of pull 200 salmon out in a week, that sort of thing. It was a, so something had gone very, very wrong. And the Swedes were very, very angry, and the Norwegians. I mean they were really angry. And I saw this from the inside, very much. CEGB’s [Central Electricity Generating Board’s] argument was that we build 200 metre high chimneys, the pollutants were all so dilute by the time they reach ground level, they couldn’t cause any damage to any part of the environment at any time. Well this was absolutely bollocks, of course.  It’s – these ecosystems are so sensitive that it takes only a tiny increase in acidity before they start going acid, and the damage occurs. It was quite clear when people started inconveniently poking around places like Galloway and, you know, North Wales and places, that the lakes were acid in many cases and in many cases hadn’t got fish. Also, you know, this is talking about the sort of ‘70s, that old men said, ‘When I was a boy I used to fish in that loch, and now there aren’t any fish in it.’  And this was sneered at, I remember, as anecdotal evidence and of no value whatsoever. The CEGB really denied everything, you know.


Nigel Bell recalls research on the effects of acid rain in Europe

Ann Wintle interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of British Science, British Library, catalogue reference C1379/57/07. © British Library Board.

Interviewer: Can you give us a sense of why the geologists involved here were interested in doing anything at all with these deposits? What was the reason?

Ann: Well, they saw them as the equivalent of the deep sea records. At that time Nick Shackleton and his colleagues round the world were constructing climate records based on what was going on in the oceans. They were looking at the oxygen isotopes of these foraminifera and there recording the temperatures and ice volume records through the ocean water and the isotopes going into the shells. But, you know, man is living on the land, so we actually would like to know rather more directly, and here we have these deposits where you can see the climate change rather more directly. Was there no deposit there because at that time it was under ice? How did the climate change? In the sense that you could look at – different grain sizes would tell you how close you were to the ice front. So you can get all sorts of subtle changes in the loess in terms of grain size, depending on wind strength and the – of source – availability of source material, like a retreating ice sheet will be churning out lots of glacial flour, which can then be picked up and blown. So you’re able to construct what the environment was like. And also within it, when there were the warmer interglacial periods like we’re in now, then you have soils forming in them and you want to know when those soils formed, how long did they last, how long is our present interglacial going to be? It’s been around for about 10,000 years, you know, how rapidly will it end? How rapidly did the last interglacial end? And so when you’re going into a cold period, what happens? So all of those things are recorded there on the land and you can go and look at it. It’s inexpensive; it’s not like you have to get a deep sea drilling ship to go and drill. Anybody can just walk up to the deposit, look at it and sa7, ‘Ooh, I can see that it isn’t completely uniform.  I wonder why it’s not.  What was going on?’


Ann Wintle on loess (silty) deposits as records of environmental change

Russell Coope interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of British Science, British Library, catalogue reference C1379/63/02. © British Library Board.

Transcript:

I went down to the – got on the bus and went to Upton Warren and I nearly fell over a mammoth tusk, and there were bones sticking out all over the place; reindeer antlers, woolly rhinoceros teeth and jaws, all lying around in the bottom of the pit. And then one of the quarry men said to me, he says, ‘You know where those bones come from?’ and I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘You see that black seam?’  There was a layer of black in the middle of the gravel, he says, ‘they all fall out of that,’ and he says, ‘it’s full of seashells.’ Well if you know anything about geography you’ll know that Droitwich ain’t very near the sea so this became unlikely. And I got a biscuit tin and I put some of this black mud in to wash the shells out. And amongst the ‘seashells’ – they weren’t, they were freshwater molluscs – were bits of beetle. The beetle bits were clearly contemporary with the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. I knew not what they were but what sort of things they were. Some of the things I was looking at Upton Warren were familiar but some of them that weren’t. Now there is a group of beetles, dung beetles, this group of beetle are known as aphodius and amongst my bits were lots and lots of them with a bit horn in the middle of its head which split into two at the top. We found that this was in fact living but not in Europe but living in Asia, and it was a – a species now confined to high altitude in Tibet. What living in Britain during the Ice Age? Some of the things were sufficiently peculiar that I went to visit a specialist in the group that I was interested in, the carabidae, the ground beetles, a man called Carl Lindroth at the University of Lund. And I showed him my stuff and he just looked at one thing and he said, ‘Do you know what that is?’ and I said, ‘Well I know the sort of thing but it doesn’t look quite right.’ He says, ‘you’re dead right it doesn’t, it’s an East Siberian species, where did you get it from?’ I said, ‘Worcestershire’ [laughs]. You can imagine we had a rather – a confrontation and the reason was that most people in those days believed that the present day distribution of an animal was somehow an indication of its evolutionary history, but now I was looking at present day distributions which had no relationship to a past distribution. And so to discover things that are living either exclusively in Tibet or exclusively in Eastern Asia, extreme Eastern Asia, all sorts of extraordinary things started to appear out of the woodwork. And with them the consequences that I’m sure you’re aware of now, that they are trying to tell us something, by the way they’ve changed their distributions, about past environments. Notice they are still living species but they live in a different place and that is rather vital because they haven’t evolved to fit the new conditions, they’ve simply moved. And that was the discovery that started off at Upton Warren [laughs] long long ago.


Russell Coope finds that fossil beetles tell a story of climate change

Julia Slingo interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of British Science, British Library, catalogue reference C1379/61/04. © British Library Board.

Transcript: 

Tony had been offered a visiting scientist position at NCAR which is the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and I was then having my, our second daughter, Anna, who was born in September 1985. So we went out in January 1986 to Boulder for a year’s visiting scientist with two small children. And I had at that time again no definite plans to work while we were out in Boulder, but they were incredibly – I suppose forward looking in a way that they recognised that working, you know, young mothers who were scientists need help to keep their careers going and so that first year and a half that we were there as – when Tony was a visiting scientist – the head of the whole division was a man called Warren Washington who was one of the great American scientists, pioneer of climate modelling and climate change prediction and so forth. He sort of encouraged me in a way to do a bit of work if I wanted to and so although I didn’t have a job per se he gave me a great slug of computing time, [laughs] an account on the machine and, you know, and I could go and sit in Tony’s office if I wanted to. And they gave me a terminal at home which was linked into this – the computer at NCAR via the phone line. So I had – I could actually run some experiments and that was Tony and I did some joint papers at that time on – on cloud radiation interaction and cloud forcing of climate. And I can still remember submitting my jobs to the supercomputer from the basement of our home via this terminal over the phone line, it was a modem system so – and it was so slow that you pressed the keys but you wouldn’t be able to see what you’d typed because the letters would come up so slowly.  So I’d sit there in the evenings down in the basement and I’d type this instruction in, press return and then I’d go and iron one of Tony’s shirts and in the time it took me to iron his shirt the – the message would go through to the computer and then I could type the next line and go and iron another shirt, it was that slow. But at least, you know, I was able to run some experiments with the model.


05 - Lost In November

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