Among the main attractions of New Zealand’s thermal centres are the distinctive deposits of silica known as sinter. These provide as much of a drawcard for tourists as do the effervescent hot springs and geysers that give them birth. They are remarkable, persistent, chemical sediments, deposited wherever hot water discharges at the surface. And the sinters […]...
Many seabirds are killed in the course of human fishing operations, during both trawling and longlining. This mortality is having a major detrimental impact on the numbers of larger seabirds such as albatrosses, and governments, conservation groups and fishing industries around the world are trying to find solutions to the problem. Because many trawl vessels discharge […]...
Sitting on my desk is an object that could have been left over from the set of a sci-fi movie. It is a scanner with a sinister Darth Vader look to it, an Imacon Flextight virtual-drum scanner. When this technology first appeared, it didn’t create any revolutions in the publishing industry—it was simply a desktop version […]...
This gnarled hand of land is a fist of defiant ruggedness in the monotonous flatlands of coastal Canterbury. Yet sharp topography has done little to protect the forests that once clothed the ground, of which the three wind-blown matai seen here are typical remnants. The human inhabitants of the peninsula tend to display a similar […]...
On the scent of truffles...
A year spent in search of kiwi among the ranges of the West Coast....
In rural New Zealand, every family has a collection of gumboots. When one boot gets a split, you keep the other in the hope that next time the opposite boot will fail so you’ll be able to reconstitute a pair. As every parent ruefully knows, kids’ feet grow fast, so as autumn beds in, it’s […]...
Toward the southern end of the Kaingaroa Plains on the volcanic plateau in the central North Island lies an area that, for its altitude, is as cold as anywhere in the country bar inland Otago....
