Associate Prof Craig Bunt, of Lincoln University’s Faculty of Agriculture and Life Sciences, says his friends express interest when he tells them he is using cutting-edge science to determine what was in dog biscuits used in early expeditions about 100 years ago.
"Everybody’s excited, they’re curious and they want to learn more," he said.
"It makes for an interesting dinnertime or staffroom conversation."
Prof Bunt was at the University of Otago chemistry department yesterday, and the department’s advanced scientific equipment has been used to study the early 20th-century biscuits using two forms of vibrational spectroscopy — one using infrared light and the other, low-energy lasers.
The research has been conducted in the laboratory of Prof Keith Gordon, who is also a principal investigator at the Dodd-Walls Centre.
Postdoctoral fellow Dr Sara Miller, of the laboratory, said vibrational spectroscopy used a light source to collect a vibrational "fingerprint" from various molecules in a sample, but did not destroy it.
Prof Bunt’s research is highly collaborative and supports other research inquiries being made by his wife, Canterbury Museum curator human history Dr Jill Haley.
It is unclear if the recovered biscuits were used by Robert Falcon Scott on his 1910 expedition, during which he died, or by fellow explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton in a later expedition.
Dog biscuits at the time were a "fairly new invention", and were an attempt to use the best science of the day to keep the dogs alive in extreme conditions, he said.
The initial research outcome was "very positive", valuable data had been collected and the collaborative work would continue to shed more light on the topic, he said.
