The Auckland Museum has an interactive exhibit where you can go into a little house and watch a (fake) news broadcast. It shows a suburb with a view of the ocean and then suddenly one of the underwater volcanos erupts which causes the house exhibit to shake and the lights flicker.
It's pretty neat and worth a try for anyone visiting Auckland. Having lived here my whole life, I can say that the news broadcast is refreshed every few years and is portrayed by our actual prime time news anchors (from our state broadcaster)
Oh man, I've been considering emigrating to Auckland and now you tell me that apart from insane house prices there would also be supervulcano status to worry about?
Toupo: supervolcano double the size of Yellowstone
Wellington: been waiting for "the big one" earthquake as long as I can remember.
Christchurch: Had their big one, the paved roads turned to sand. Entire suburbs got abandoned. Main shopping district is still made out of shipping containers.
Everywhere: no ozone, you burn instantly in summer without 100spf at 10am and even then it's still kind of stupid to go outside at all around 2pm.
Seriously, just do yourself a favour, move to Sydney, Australia. The snakes mostly keep to the outer suburbs and the spiders aren't that scary. The giant flying cockroaches take a bit to get used to though.
Auckland: Has a motorway network that would allow the city to evacuate within a few days.
Taupo: was a long time a go and has some good hot water now because of it.
Wellington: it would be mostly the bureaucratic class to go
Christchurch: yes, there is still remnants of an earthquake 13 years gone but you get used to the marine vibe with the shipping containers, a little bit of Lyttelton vibe in the big smoke.
As for the ozone, we can hardly be blamed for that. And our most dangerous animal has been eaten to extinction, I would suggest Australians start down the list and do the same.
Also that was not the big one. The Christchurch earthquakes were from previously unknown faults.
The _big_one_ is supposed to be the Alpine fault because we've got the entire country on two continental plates.
Wikipedia says
"The last major earthquake on the Alpine Fault was in about 1717 AD with a great earthquake magnitude of Mw8.1 plus or minus 0.1 The probability of another one occurring before 2068 was estimated at 75 percent in 2021"
That 1866 map on the Wikipedia link is stunning, I remember being shown it during a Phyisical Geography class at the University of Auckland, the professors comments at the time where something along the lines of "probably okay, but also might not be" - as if. The fact Rangitoto (a giant shield volcano smack bang in the middle of the City) is c. 600 years old is incredible - its an absolute baby on the geological record.
New Zealand is a ticking time bomb for natural catastrophy, whether its Taupo (or the wider Central Platuea), Aucklands field awakening from its momentary sleep (there are occasionally small disturbances), a quake in Wellington or god forbid a Tsunami coming from the Hikurangi or Kermadic trenches. New Zealand has been relatively lucky for its short inhabited history when taken against its status as a highly exposed member of the Ring of Fire.
If Taupo goes again there probably isn’t anywhere on earth that won’t notice.
Supposedly the Romans and Chinese recorded some of its effects when it went ~2000 years ago.
The Romans and Chinese noticed when Taupo went off last time, so there isn’t much point evacuating, you’re dead. The scale of that eruption was just incredible.
“The eruption ejected some 45–105 km3 (11–25 cu mi) of bulk tephra, of which just over 30 km3 (7.2 cu mi) was ejected in approximately 6–7 minutes… The main extremely violent pyroclastic flow travelled at close to the speed of sound and devastated the surrounding area, climbing over 1,500 m (4,900 ft) to overtop the nearby Kaimanawa Ranges and Mount Tongariro, and covering the land within 80 km (50 mi) with ignimbrite… There were massive changes in the landscape for 40 km (25 mi) around with all life sterilised and prior landforms evened out.”
It’s hard to move in Auckland pretty much any time. A tactical volcano might improve Auckland's infrastructure, hopefully joining the North Shore to the city in a way no politician has ever managed.
> The longest of those in Auckland run up to 290m (957ft); in the US, that figure is closer to 4km (2.5 miles), with Ape Cave at the Gifford National Park in Washington the longest continuous tube in North America.
If we are comparing lava tubes, the longest in Australia is the Bayliss Cave at Undara, Queensland, at 1300 metres long. Kazumura Cave in Hawaii is a lava tube over 65 km long, but that is including human-dug tunnels through collapsed sections. Working out what is the longest lava tube in the world not counting collapses is a bit trucky; Kazumura is near the top of the list (at around 11 km for longest uncollapsed section) but Bilemot Gul on South Korea’s Jeju island apparently beats it. [0]
That's respect for Maori culture. Which pretty lame for country so pragmatic and atheistic.
Maori science [0] is being reintroduced in schools too. And while it's not some woowoo science it still feels forced, almost like a brand for big corps.
There's 0% Maori culture in my day to day life unless it's some business trying to be hip (see: AirNZ cabin safety videos).
I feel you're probably injecting that in there haha! :) I think they're just saying there's sacred spaces and others and there's different uses for each. Quiet contemplation versus parties: different :) hahahaha :)
This church rave in the 90s (I too miss that time a bit! Where I grew up it was 61 regent st haha! :)), was it an active church or a disused one, or don't know? Haha! :)
Kiwi here - Here's something cool: My grandparents (both still alive but over 100) grandparents were among the first settlers here in NZ.
Not the very first to land, a few decades after that, but early enough that they had to build a single room shelter out of clay and mud, and hunt in nature for food. Now, as I sit on the 20th floor in an air conditioned flat with gigabit ethernet, I overlook the city, and marvel about how quickly a country can be built up from nothing.
One other thing that is interesting, my grandparents were farmers their whole lives and only recently retired, when they started farming they were still using horses, and now their farm has computer controlled, almost entirely automated combine harvestors, they themselves often tell us they cant believe the rate at which farming automation advanced - they manage an enormous farm - so big I dont know the boundaries - with less than 10 people because of all the automation. It's pretty impressive to a non-farmer like me.
Among the first European settlers, sure, same here (more like my grandparents' grandparents' grandparents), but a few centuries after the first settlers.
It's pretty inspiring that the Maori got here long before them with such primitive technology, I always thought that was a really incredible illustration of human spirit and bravery.
My parents flew me to NZ as a 3 month old baby to show to my aunt. They would remark about how the airport was little more than a corrugated iron hut at the time.
I love NZ deeply and when I visited again later in life parts of the islands gave me the feeling that it was still a frontier.
I guess it's all about perspective. I was born kiwi and grew up here until I was 24, then. I spent 10 years travelling, I lived in Spain, France, UK, Germany, Austria, Turkey, Dubai, LA, each for 8months - 1 year, and visited all the countries surrounding each.
I've seen a lot of east european poverty and watched covid induced unemployment convert entire districts of cities into violent crime pits. When I came back to NZ I found New Zealanders complaining about such trivial things quite sad. New Zealand isn't perfect, but here, in the great scheme of things, we have it good.
Not quite entirely birds, but no land mammals except tiny bats. Humans made their mark pretty quickly and destructively. As a New Zealander, this to me is one of the saddest pages on the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Zealand_species_ex...
There was rapid cultural evolution among the Māori as well; consider the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pā#Gunfighter_pā . I don't know if they came up with bastions independently or swiped them from the Empire, but, having been used to full and frank discussions among themselves, they certainly adjusted quickly to artillery.
> The British used to think the bayonet was the most lethal of all hand to hand combat weapons, till they came across our warriors, who fought with the Taiaha. You think your fist is your weapon? When I have taught you, your mind will be. —??B
As a New Zealander that travels a bit, even with modern technology I can say that it's bloody hard to get to and from NZ (read: it's close to nothing).
Incredibly impressive that people were able to find NZ on boats. I can hardly navigate a few streets without GPS.
Yeah, that is fascinating. good point. Is it impossible that there were humans there a loooong time before who then left/died out? Would be interesting too haha :)
Just wanted to say, I adore Maurice Gee, "The Halfmen of O" left quite the impression on me as a child. Great quintessential New Zealand sci-fi novels from a fantastic mind.
How does a news site operate without plaintext? The body element is entirely empty. Is there no need for SEO or accessibility? At some point last decade the text-only version of the BBC was discontinued, but instead you can only compare to the likes of the NPR Text-Only Version https://text.npr.org.
