Last week I was involved in a NASA Spaceward Bound meeting in Te Takinga Marae in Rotorua. The purpose of the meeting was to promote interest in Planetary Geology and Astrobiology, and it was attended by about 50 scientists, educators, undergraduates and school students from New Zealand, Australia, the USA, Romania, the UK and Kazakhstan. […]
NASA comes to Rotorua Read More »
Earlier this week I decided to spend the night camping up on the North Crater of Tongariro. This is the large flat crater that is off to the north and west of the main track of the Tongariro Crossing. For access information have a look at the GeoTrip page here: www.geotrips.org.nz/trip.html?id=279Here is a view across
Tongariro North Crater Read More »
If you had to work out the daily quantities of different gases coming out of a volcano and spreading across the sky in a huge, mostly invisible plume, where would you begin? This video gives a brief introduction to how New Zealand’s GeoNet scientists go about it: The information is combined with other evidence such
Volcano Gas Flights Video Read More »
My next experience of a GeoNet gas monitoring flight was over Tongariro and Ruapehu. This time Karen Britten and I were joined by Fiona Atkinson (left in photo) who is part of the GeoNet volcano monitoring team. As we approached the volcanoes from over Lake Taupo, the small gas plume from Te Maari was visible.
Flight over Tongariro and Ruapehu Read More »
Climbing Ngauruhoe from the South is well off the tourist route, and involves scrambling up unstable blocks of lava for about 700 vertical metres up the face of the cone. I chose to go up more or less up the centre of the view you can see here, and it took me about an hour
Ngauruhoe’s Far Side Read More »
Last weekend I went to camp and tramp in the Tama Lakes area on the saddle between Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe. These lakes were created by several explosion craters within the last ten thousand years giving them a circular or crescent form. The landscape is covered with blocks of lava and scoria as well as some