Blowing in the Wind: Pollen’s Mobility as a Challenge to Measuring Climate by Proxy, 1916–1939

‘The man who vacuum cleaned the Atlantic’ − the aerosol collector and Gunnar Erdtman’s attempts to measure pollen rain

“…As such, this is also seen as a further contribution to the history of palynology and more widely to the historiography of the field, ocean and aerobiological sciences (cf. Manten 1966; Sarjeant 2002; Birks 2005; Edlund and Winthrop 2014; Riding and Dettmann 2014; Edwards et al 2017; Birks and Berglund 2018; De Klerk 2018; Edwards 2018, 2021; Edwards and Pardoe 2018; Gaillard et al 2018; Troels-Smith et al 2018; Edwards and Mao 2021; Charenko 2022; Hooghiemstra and Richards 2022).…”

“…From first mentions in the late 1930s (Irmscher 1938;Wenner 1939), Erdtman's 1937 paper continued to gain attention from researchers writing in the journals of such varied disciplines as palynology, biology, aerobiology, archaeology, geography, climatology, oceanography and agricultural science (e.g. Deevey 1944;Griffiths 1950;Polunin 1951;Hyv€ arinen 1970;Kramer et al 1973;Hjelmroos 1991;Wolf et al 2001;Giesecke et al 2010;Hernandez-Ceballos 2014;Bajpai and Kar 2018), as well, most recently, in the history of biology (Charenko 2022). 1 However, Erdtman's use of the vacuum cleaner (Swedish 'dammsugare') on an Atlantic voyage had earlier or at least contemporaneous beginnings with his seemingly forgotten land-based pollen-sampling experiments.…”