The northwest and southeast of New Zealand are the least earthquake-y this summer.
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As a group of islands sitting on a plate boundary in the roaring forties, New Zealand is always going to be susceptible to such natural hazards as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, storms and floods – they’re the flipside of the dramatic and dynamic landscape we all love and enjoy. This year, though, has been a devastating reminder of how vulnerable we are.
So, as we head off for our summer holidays, it’s worth having an emergency plan, says Chandrika Kumaran of the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management. The ministry recommends keeping a basic emergency kit in your car while you’re travelling, and if you’re heading for the beach, making sure you’re familiar with tsunami warning sirens and evacuation routes. If a big earthquake strikes – one where it is hard to stand up, or a weak, rolling quake that lasts a minute or more – “act quickly”, says Kumaran. “Don’t worry about looking foolish – it’s better to be up the hill feeling foolish for overreacting, than down the hill wishing you hadn’t waited.”
But if you want to avoid the beaches, volcanoes and shaky bits of New Zealand this summer, there are lots of other places you can visit, and many of them are great holiday destinations. I asked some earth scientists and one meteorologist for their picks on some alternative summer holiday spots.
Mark Quigley, a geologist from the University of Canterbury, points out “much of New Zealand’s natural beauty is attributable to the effects of thousands of earthquakes over many thousands and millions of years – without earthquakes much of the country would lie beneath the ocean”. But for a quiet place where the ground is less likely to be shaking, says Quigley, head for the northwest or southeast ends of the country. “A whisky or two coupled with some fresh seafood in Oamaru or Dunedin, or a sojourn to the warm Bay of Islands, will reduce your chances of feeling an earthquake,” he says. Quigley, however, is embracing New Zealand’s geological activity this summer – he’s planning to walk the Tongariro crossing.
Michael Crozier, emeritus professor of geomorphology at Victoria University, has a favourite destination. “There’s only one answer if you want a safe place to visit”, he says, and that’s Oamaru. “The best long-term gauge of susceptibility is to look at how much uplift the area has had. Oamaru has a shore platform [old beach] that is 125,000 years old and is 6m above present sea level. That is exactly the height we would expect the beach to be if there had been no uplift. In Wellington, that same 125,000-year-old beach is more than 100m above sea level, indicating that the land there has been going up as a result of tectonic movement, associated with numerous earthquakes.”
Another plus is that Oamaru has had no volcanic activity since the Oligocene epoch, more than 20 million years ago. “There is a bit of shoreline erosion, but most of Oamaru is above tsunami reach,” says Crozier. “And while there is the occasional flood, drought or snowstorm, most of these events can be sat out in the wonderful coffee bars, art galleries and pubs of this best-preserved colonial town in New Zealand.”
Joel Baker, a geology professor at Victoria University, studies supervolcanoes, but says when he’s choosing a holiday destination the “quality of the company, weather and fishing” is of more concern to him than proximity to a magma chamber. New Zealand is a great place to study supervolcanoes – of 10 supereruptions on the planet in the past 2.5 million years, four of them were in New Zealand – and Baker’s geochemical forensic work, with fellow professor Colin Wilson, is aimed at predicting future eruptions from supervolcanoes like the Taupo caldera. If you want a holiday destination as far as you can from a volcano, he recommends giving the middle of the North Island a miss and heading for “the Bay of Islands or Fiordland, both great places for a holiday”.
Getting as far away from the plate boundary as you can is the best way to avoid seismic hazard, says GNS Science geologist Hamish Campbell. On that score, Auckland is our safest city, he says, but as far as holiday spots go he’d opt for the Chatham Islands or Great Barrier Island. Whatever part of the country you’re in, he says, what you need is “a well-constructed holiday house that is easily accessible to all amenities and located on some well-drained high terrace on solid rock, well-removed from the coast, with no prospect of things falling on it or it falling down onto anything”.
And if wild weather is what you want to avoid, your best bet is to “pay attention to the six-day forecast” says Erick Brenstrum, severe weather forecaster with MetService. January is usually one of the calmer, drier months of the year, but heavy rain, floods, hail and electrical storms are possible almost anywhere and at any time. Brenstrum avoids bad weather by taking his family on “mobile holidays”: plans can change depending on where he expects to find the good weather.
Wherever you spend the summer, have a happy and relaxing holiday, be safe on the roads and the beaches, and kia kaha to all our friends and family in Canterbury.
Civil Defence safety advice: www.getthru.govt.nz
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If you find yourself complaining about the weather or accommodation this summer, spare a thought for 20th-century ornithologist Lance Richdale, the subject of Neville Peat’s new biography, SEABIRD GENIUS (Otago University Press, $45). Richdale regularly camped out on the Otago peninsula and on remote islands, in all seasons and often in hideous weather, watching and photographing yellow-eyed penguins, albatrosses and petrels. His fascination with penguins’ mating habits ± he wrote books on penguin sexual behaviour – earned him the title “The Dr Kinsey of the penguin world”. Richdale’s life makes a great story, and Peat’s biography is illustrated with many of Richdale’s fabulous photographs.
Geologist Rodney Grapes has written THE VISITATION: THE EARTHQUAKES OF 1848 AND THE DESTRUCTION OF WELLINGTON (Victoria University Press, $40) as a follow-up to his 2000 book about the 1855 Wellington earthquake. With lots of great photographs, reproductions of paintings and contemporary accounts of the earthquakes, this engrossing book gives a historical as well as a geological perspective on the 1848 earthquakes.
If you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping and have a curious child to shop for, check out Marcus Chown’s new book, SOLAR SYSTEM (Faber and Faber, $49.95) – you’ll probably enjoy it as much as the child does. Astronomer Chown urges us to look up at the other worlds in our solar system, “where 100-year-old hurricanes are raging, ice volcanoes are erupting, gargantuan lightning bolts are leaping between cloud tops and moons”. Solar System is packed with information, but if you tire of the exhaustive lists of facts and figures or the fascinating science and history, then just look at the pictures. The book is subtitled “A visual exploration of the planets, moons, and other heavenly bodies that orbit our sun”, and the colour illustrations and Nasa photographs alone are worth buying the book for.