Coastal sections in the Auckland region reveal highly carbonaceous and/or highly weathered claydominated cover-bed successions with numerous discrete distal volcanic ash (tephra) layers, fluvially reworked G03058;

Numerous specimens of the conifer pollen grain Podosporites parvus, recorded at c.

A late Early Pleistocene pollen record was obtained from a coastal site in Auckland, New Zealand. A combination of isothermal plateau fission track ages on interbedded tephras, palaeomagnetism, palynostratigraphy and orbital tuning to the marine oxygen isotope record of Ocean Drilling Program Site 677 constrained the age of the topmost 28 m of sediments to c. 1.4–1.0 Ma (Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 45–28). For this interval a diverse pollen record consisting of mostly extant pollen types shows multiple compositional shifts from a Nothofagus-dominated to conifer-dominated regional vegetation. These shifts are broadly correlated to changes in the marine oxygen isotope record. The inferred climate was moist, temperate, stable, and cooler than at present, but never as cool as the last glacial maximum. A permanent increase in Nothofagus forest in the region after MIS 35 seems to be related to a long-term palaeoclimatic shift that probably included greater temperature extremes between warm and cool stages and decreases in humidity and increased seasonality during cool stages. Although the Patiki pollen record predates the mid-Pleistocene revolution by c. 100 ka, the nature of climate change itself was already in transition, and becoming more similar to the climate regime experienced in northern New Zealand in the Late Pleistocene.

Seven cores were extracted from a river terrace swamp in the forested Kauaeranga valley, Coromandel Peninsula, New Zealand. High-resolution (c. 36-73 yr interval) pollen records were obtained from four of the cores and aged by radiocarbon dating and with stratigraphic reference to the 665 ± 15 14 C yr BP Kaharoa Tephra. The records span the last c. 1800 yr and show that the vegetation consisted of lowland podocarp-hardwood forest before deforestation by burning occurred. The pattern of deforestation at Kauaeranga, indicated by the abrupt dominance of Pteridium with concurrent increased charcoal, is typical of pollen records associated with early Polynesian settlement in New Zealand. Peaks of Pteridium and charcoal were also found in sediments deposited after European settlement. Different cores show marked palynological and stratigraphic differences relative to the Kaharoa Tephra, most importantly with regard to the timing of deforestation. Deforestation occurred close to the Kaharoa, at a calculated age of c. 750 BP in one core but well above the Kaharoa (c. 480 BP) in another. The stratigraphic unconformities between cores are attributed to variable fluvial processes causing an uneven deposition of sediments within the swamp.