By Anna Bracewell-Worrall
A New Zealand author and researcher says after 130 years, he may have discovered the location of the Pink and White Terraces.
For more than 100 years, the eruption of Mt Tarawera was thought to have destroyed the Terraces. Then in 2011, a team of researchers discovered part of the Pink Terrace within Lake Tarawera.
Now, author Rex Bunn has used GNS science coupled with information collected in a lost 1859 survey of the area to help plot the location of the Terraces.
The lost survey had been conducted by Dr Ferninand Hochstetter, a geologist and cartographer. In his field notes, he mapped Lake Rotomahana before the eruption.
At the time, the Terraces were a significant tourist attraction. Mr Bunn says "they were unbelievable. There was nothing like them in the world".
The scale and colour of the Terraces meant "people had difficulty describing them" and "a whole global tourism industry revolved around it".
The Terraces were created by geothermal activity around about 1300AD. The activity "formed large aprons of falling silica terraces down to the lake." People would bathe within the pools formed on the Terraces.
In the 1886 eruption of Tarawera, the section of the Pink Terrace found in the lake by the 2011 research team may have "fractured off" and slid into the crater.
Mr Bunn's located both Terraces on land, buried deep beneath volcanic ash.
"The Terrace locations appear to be buried deep underground, and so the Pink and White Terraces may have survived the eruption after all."
Mr Bunn says "there's a slight possibility" the Terraces "might be recovered in some way". But he cautions they may be "too deeply buried beneath volcanic ash to be excavated".
At 673 pages, Bunn's new book, Quest for the Pink and White Terraces: The Expedition to Recover New Zealand's Eighth Wonder of the World, is quite a tome. But Mr Bunn says the were all necessary, because it is an "important part of our history".
The Pink Terraces are known as Otukapuarangi or 'fountain in the sky' in te reo, and the White Terraces are Te Tarata, 'the tattooed rock'.
Newshub.
