Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Land
Straddling the boundary of two great colliding slabs of the earth's crust - the Pacific plate
and the Indian/Australian plate - to this day NZ remains the plaything of nature's strongest
forces.
The result is one of the most varied and spectacular series of landscapes in the world,
ranging from snow-dusted mountains and drowned glacial valleys to rainforests, dunelands
and an otherworldly volcanic plateau. It is a diversity of landforms you would expect to
find across an entire continent rather than a small archipelago in the South Pacific.
Evidence of NZ's tumultuous past is everywhere. The South Island's mountainous spine
- the 650km-long ranges of the Southern Alps - is a product of the clash of the two plates;
the result of a process of rapid lifting that, if anything, is accelerating. Despite NZ's highest
peak, Aoraki/Mt Cook, losing 10m from its summit overnight in a 1991 landslide, the Alps
are on an express elevator that, without erosion and landslides, would see them 10 times
their present height within a few million years.
On the North Island, the most impressive changes have been wrought by volcanoes.
Auckland is built on an isthmus peppered by scoria cones, on many of which you can still
see the earthworks of pa (fortified villages) built by early Maori. The city's biggest and
most recent volcano, 600-year-old Rangitoto Island, is just a short ferry ride from the
downtown wharves. Some 300km further south, the classically shaped cone of snowcapped
Mt Taranaki/Egmont overlooks tranquil dairy pastures.
But the real volcanic heartland runs through the centre of the North Island, from the rest-
less bulk of Mt Ruapehu in Tongariro National Park northeast through the Rotorua lake dis-
trict out to NZ's most active volcano, White Island, in the Bay of Plenty. Called the Taupo
Volcanic Zone, this great 250km-long rift valley - part of a volcano chain known as the
'Pacific Ring of Fire' - has been the seat of massive eruptions that have left their mark on
the country physically and culturally.
Most spectacular were the eruptions that created Lake Taupo. Considered the world's
most productive volcano in terms of the amount of material ejected, Taupo last erupted
1800 years ago in a display that was the most violent anywhere on the planet within the
past 5000 years.
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