Having completed (nearly) all the adventurous things that we had planned for the holiday, we're now back in tourist mode. So today started with a very long, cooked breakfast with lots of tea in a nice café in Taupo.
We then headed off to see one of the recommended geothermal areas, Orakei Korako. Amongst a host of geothermal-type things, steam-vents, geysers etc, this had one of Hannah's favourite things... boiling mud. It also had a cave, but we were disappointed by the complete absence of any Phytokarsts. So we watched the boiling mud for a while, and then went to the café for more tea.
In the afternoon, we went for a soak in some hot pools. This involved a lecture about the numerous 'health and wellbeing' properties of the water, and how it was important not to shower for 6-8 hours after being in the water or we would wash the health and wellbeings off.
Cheesy lectures aside, it was very relaxing, with hot water pouring down a hillside and falling into the pools through a waterfall. We both feel much more relaxed as a result.
Lake Taupo is actually a crater from the most explosive recorded volcanic event. We've seen a few craters in the last couple of weeks but at 33km across, this one wins hands down.
Ooh now THAT doesn't look like the Wye Valley does it! I love calcite terraces and all that dribbly colourful hard stuff that looks as though it's been designed by Gaudi. That looks like Mammouth Hot Springs at Yellowstone looked like 30 years ago. It didn't, 20ish years ago - the water flow had changed and the terraces had dried up. But we have just booked flights to go to there in Sept. That crater was 34 by 45 miles, but no-one was around to see it go pop. Not afterwards, anyway. Anywhere.
ReplyDeleteBoiling mud is a great favourite here, too. The sound "gloppity-gloop" and the sulphurous smell.
Er.
Ok then. We associate sulphur with the fires of Hell etc, and indeed it seems to associate itself with volcanic activity. Why is this? Discuss...
The river you can turn on and off reminds me of a colleague who went white-water rafting somewhere in the US years ago. The rafting people had to phone the power company to find out which river would be providing "resource", and when.
Is the beer good?
The explosion that formed Lake Taupo wasn't exactly recorded. If I remember correctly, it was around AD 181, before New Zealand was settled by anyone and when India still seemed a very long way away from a European point of view.... It was the largest-known eruption of the last 5000 years, but the largest-recorded eruption goes to Tambora in 1815 (as in, someone wrote about it) and the largest-known eruption ever goes to Toba 70,000-odd years ago.
ReplyDeleteBasically, the lesson from volcanology is that: if you want stupidly-large eruptions, go to Indonesia. They all happen there.
Physical-geography-pedantry over.
Sulphur is associated with volcanic activity because a lot of minerals contain sulphur. When these end up in/as magma, they can obviously melt, releasing the sulphur, which will then end up as either sulphur dioxide (the vast majority of it) or hydrogen sulphide (a minority, but a really nasty one). They're both gases, so, sooner-or-later, they'll exsolve from the magma and get vented to the surface, giving you that lovely sulphurous smell. Pro tip: don't breather volcanic gas - as well as all the very-fatal H2S and quite-fatal SO2, there's insanely-fatal F, Cl and all sorts of other nasty things in there.
All the sulphurous gases eventually end up reacting with water in the atmosphere to form sulphuric acid, giving acid rain. Being downwind of a major volcanic eruption is not a good survival strategy.
Pedantry really over now.
May we just briefly record that we don't really believe Samuel's final four words, above...
ReplyDelete"India still seemed a very long way away ..." Actually there was a thriving trade route between India and the Roman empire at the time. There is one theory which claims taxing it provided the Roman state with most of its income.
ReplyDelete"India still seemed a very long way away ..." Actually there was a thriving trade route between India and the Roman empire at the time. There is one theory which claims taxing it provided the Roman state with most of its income.
ReplyDeleteYes, but it took an awful long time to get there was the point....
ReplyDelete