Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Environment
New Zealand is a young country - its present shape is less than 10,000
years old. Having broken away from the supercontinent of Gondwanaland
(which included Africa, Australia, Antarctica and South America) in a stately
geological dance some 85 million years ago, it endured continual uplift and
erosion, buckling and tearing, and the slow fall and rise of the sea, as ice
ages came and went.
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 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.
Vaughan Yarwood is a historian and travel writer who is widely published in New Zealand
and internationally. His most recent book is
The History Makers: Adventures in New Zeal-
and Biography
.
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 snow-
capped Mt Taranaki/Egmont overlooks tranquil dairy pastures.
