New Zealand has thousands of active faults each of which will produce an earthquake of some magnitude when it ruptures. However the two giants are the Alpine Fault and the Hikurangi Subduction Fault. They each form a segment of the plate boundary – the Alpine Fault can be traced across land, the length of the South […]
What’s on our Plates? Read More »
Tora is a small rural community on the Wairarapa Coast of the North Island of New Zealand. There are many interesting geological outcrops and landforms in the area. For me the most spectacular of these are in the area of sloping farmland just south of where the inland road meets the coast. On a recent
Raised Beaches at Tora Read More »
Having had a close up look to the surface trace of the Wairarapa Fault (see recent post here), I thought it would be interesting to find out the latest about what such a major geological structure looks like below the earth’s surface. Stuart Henrys and colleagues at Victoria University, the University of Tokyo, Japan, and
Imaging the Crust beneath Wellington Read More »
The blasts from the seismic survey were detectable by GeoNet as very small local ground tremors along the seismic line last week: PRELIMINARY EARTHQUAKE REPORT GNS SCIENCE
Shooting the SAHKE Seismic Survey across the North Island Read More »
About a dozen field teams have been out over the weekend deploying geophones along the 90 kilometre transect of the SAHKE seismic survey. The first photo shows some of the Orica contractors loading and priming one of the transect shot holes. 500 kilogrammes of explosive emulsion is being pumped down a 50m bore hole. The
SAHKE – Seismic Array Hikurangi Experiment Read More »
Ever since 1855, when New Zealand’s largest ever recorded earthquake (magnitude 8.1) shook the Wellington Region, a lot of effort has gone into understanding the earthquake risk in and around New Zealand’s capital city. There are several large fault lines in the area, including the Wellington Fault. This is the most active fault of the
Wellington’s Stuck Plate Boundary Read More »
Our expedtion to explore the hydrothermal activity and mineralisation of the Kermadec arc volcanoes is now over. We arrived back in Auckland yesterday, after a successful three week research cruise. Amongst the discoveries that were made were areas of present day and ancient hydrothermal activity, relatively fresh lava flows from previously uninvestigated volcanic craters, and
Kermadec Arc Videos Read More »