Ring of Fire

Our drive across the North Island yesterday gave  us a sense of the landscapes—fields, sheep, mountains. In general, New Zealand (outside Auckland) seems like a quiet, rural sort of place--reminds me a bit of Ireland.  We noted a few places we’d stop and spend more time on the way back to Auckland.  Today we begin our official sight-seeing in Rotorua.

This is the view from our hotel room--and that steam is providing the sulfurous odor we’ve noted. 

 “steamy view from hotel 

New Zealand sits on the Ring of Fire, which goes along the eastern edge of Asia, north across the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and south along the coast of North and South America.  Three fourths of the planet’s volcanoes and earthquakes are on the Ring.

A (very short) geology lesson   

Geologists have learned that the earth is made of moving ‘plates’ of rock.   Think of the earth as a ball made of glass, covered unevenly by dirt.  The ‘ball’ is broken into pieces.  You can’t see the cracks because they’re (usually) miles below the surface. But they’re there and they constantly move.  

When things go smoothly, you’re not aware of the motion.  All of this movement creates a tremendous amount of energy that can heat rock to a melting point--we call it magma when it’s in the ground, lava when it rises from the surface.  Over millions of years, one plate might rise over another, creating a mountain.  Or the melted rock may make it’s way to the surface---either explosively or slowly-- volcano.  And if a piece of plate gets stuck as it’s moving, and then suddenly breaks free, there’s a jolt--that’s an earthquake.  

I promised this was a short lesson, so I won’t go into much more detail.  Here are the important points: most (not all) of these cracks go around the Pacific--hence the name, ‘Ring of Fire‘.  Along this ring we find many mountains (like those in British Columbia, where I went heli-hiking) volcanoes (like Mount St. Helens in Washington) and earthquakes (Japan, San Francisco)--all because of the moving plates.

In a few places on the planet, the layer covering those moving plates is thin, and we not only have mountains or volcanoes or earthquakes,  but also a chance to see, rising from the depths of the earth, some of what normally stays far beneath us.  Rotorua is one of those places, and the things we will see here, like those in Yellowstone National Park, are rare geothermal phenomena.  That, and an introduction to the Maori, await us tomorrow in Rotorua.