Lake Taupo lies in the caldera of an active supervolcano, the site of the world’s most violent eruption of the last 70,000 years. Just 10 km beneath it sits another lake of molten rock 50 km wide and 160 km long. With a growing need for alternative energy sources, plans for tapping this latent reservoir […]...
The Fate of Flight 901...
New Zealand extends through a wide range of latitudes—from semi-tropical waters off the Kermadec Islands in the north, to frigid, tempestuous seas that lash subantarctic islands in the south. Here, unique marine organisms inhabit an equally strange underwater terrain, a product of the volcanism that accompanies seafloor subduction to form ridges, reefs, pinnacles and a […]...
Founding editor Kennedy Warne has contributed more to the past 100 issues of New Zealand Geographic than most....
I look forward to October, traditionally the opening month of the trout fishing season in the south, very much, and have done every year since 1953–54. That’s when I first became attracted to, then entranced by, rivers and streams. I found rapture, excitement, mystery and magic there. Which is why, undoubtedly, rivers have kept turning […]...
The community comedies made in the late 1920s by the pioneer New Zealand filmmaker Rudall Hayward always involved a standard plot: there was the pretty school teacher who, according to the narrative, arrives in a peaceful town and “sets the hearts of all the boys aglow”. She is then pursued by two locals, a villain […]...
We live in a world of bewildering complexity, and there is generally far too much going on around us for us to be aware of everything the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches that constantly harass our senses. Our brains have therefore evolved to select some aspects of the world for mental processing, and ignore […]...
“My God, you’re still alive!” read the email, from a former colleague, with which Emeritus Professor Roy Kerr opened his public lecture at Cambridge University. Kerr was evidently thriving on the attention he’d received since being headhunted out of retirement to join the International Centre for Relativistic Astrophysics in Italy. Officially, his job is researching […]...
