Into the vortex

Something out of the ordinary has been unfolding above the South Pole....

Plant-based feast

Why it’s a boom year for kākāpō and rodents alike....

In the wind

On Monday, February 13, an electrical fault on Early Valley Road at Lansdowne near Christchurch sparked a fire. An hour and a half later, another fire was reported several kilometres further east, near Dyers Pass, one of three roads crossing the Port Hills. By Wednesday night, the fires had joined to become one large conflagration, […]...

After the deluge

Autumn rainfall looks set to break records, and ‘teleconnections’ may be to blame....

Cyclogenesis is so 2016…

So in January we tried the ‘explosive’ kind....

An ill wind

How hurricanes influenced the result of elections across the Americas....

Inundated

Snow in Hawke’s Bay in August 2016 echoes the catastrophic flood of 1938....

Fine weather for a shipwreck

While many ships founder in foul weather, a few are saved by a timely spell of calm....

1816

The year without a summer....

Fiji ‘caned

Hurricane Winston brought gusts over 300 km/h...

Cyclones in the desert

The year ended with a sizzle, as temperatures hit records, and cyclones spiralled into new territory....

Broken record

A record low temperature, accepted only this year, dates back more than a century....

Cold wars

Lessons from the Little Ice Age....

Twin storms

Storms in May and June brought heavy rain and flooding to Kāpiti and Dunedin. Are the events connected?...

Danger isles

How New Zealand’s most dangerous islands revolutionised our weather forecasting....

Blowing hot and cold

Climate change made 2014 the hottest year on record, and delivered record snowfalls too....

Head in the clouds

Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, was an astute observer of the weather, an inventor, and member of the influential Lunar Society....

The river wild

The rage of the Clutha scattered livestock and infrastructure...

Gas attack

As the climate warms, methane is liberated in strange and unusual ways....

Magazine

Issue 200

Jul - Aug 2026

Solar power
Horses of Huntly
Forget me not
Whaling
Red admirals

Issue 200 Jul - Aug 2026

Trending

Tongariro is by far the most popular national park in the North Island, attracting tens of thousands of skiers, walkers and trampers every year. The park centres around three active volcanoes: Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu, all of which are considered by local Maori to be sacred ancestors. In 1887 the chief of the local iwi Ngati […]...
Chess in a land of life and death...
I slithered along the gravel through a streamway barely 25 centimetres high, 10 centi­metres of water lapping gently along the centre line of my face. With my head turned sideways, I could breathe only through the top of my mouth by pursing my lips, awkwardly, into a snorkel shape, as freezing water sloshed about my […]...
Fine documentary photojournalists are as rare and as delightful to encounter as any of New Zealand’s endangered species. As this magazine’s art director, I am all too aware of the difficulties that a complex photo-journalistic assignment poses. An instinct that puts a photographer in a certain place at a certain time with an eye for the […]...
You find something, something old, something with a tale to tell. Who do you call?...
The Darran Mountains lie deep in the marrow of northern Fiordland—a chunky, perplexing range of diorites and sandstones, gneisses and granites. This is a land of extremes, with the country’s most remote summits, the greatest rainfall and the longest, hardest-to-climb alpine rock walls. Adventurers have been coming here since William Grave and Arthur Talbot in […]...
Where can the city dweller look for the inexhaustible wild? Perhaps it lies closer than we think, on the flipside of the ordinary, along the unkempt edges of the familiar. An urban green space can become a site of pilgrimage, a place to discover a waterfall by moonlight....
On January 23 1863, the German-born geol­ogist Johann Franz Julius von Haast reached the mountain pass that bears his name; a momentous occasion as he believed his par­ty of five to be the first Europeans to traverse the 564 m crossing....
I grew up with a mainsheet be­tween my teeth, and every sum­mer as the mercury rises, the salinity of my blood seems to in­crease in anticipation of another dousing. There is nothing, in all the world, more satisfying than hoisting a rag, casting off from the tangle of civilisation and sail­ing towards a beckoning horizon. You […]...
Robotic in form and startlingly efficient en masse, ants have outlived the dinosaurs and now scuttle over every major landmass but Antarctica. Humans can learn a lot from these diminutive critters, which communicate using cocktails of exotic pheromones, expeditiously divide labour among thousands, and silently conduct their small and significant lives for the greater good—of the colony and their immediate […]...

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