Environment – Miracles of life

Billions of dollars are spent sending people into space, and there are far-fetched visions of life on Mars and the Moon. But the wonders of the origins of matter and life can be found much closer to home.

New Zealand was built up from tectonic forces and volcanism. We’re on the Pacific Ring of Fire, sitting on the edges of the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates. Plate collision, uplift and subduction create eruptions, magma flow, steam and ash. We live on shaky isles on mobile and active volcanic fields. We live among the forces of creation and destruction.

Auckland’s volcanic field includes 53 volcanic centres. Though they’ve been quarried, bulldozed, filled in and built over, they give the region a geography that’s distinctly ours. From the sentinel of Rangitoto guarding the harbour to the views from Maungawhau, our cones, craters and lava flows show the malleability of landforms shaped by massive forces.

Those massive forces are obvious in other volcanic areas around the North Island. I recently kayaked across Lake Tarawera. The lake and its mountain are part of the Okataina volcanic field, and the site of the most lethal eruption in NZ’s recorded history. In 1886, the Tarawera eruption generated earthquakes, lightning storms, firestorms, suffocating gases and ash. The explosion created a 17km rift, and tore open Mt Tarawera to create a six-kilometre-long crater. It destroyed the pink and white travertine terraces, and killed over 100 people.

After we kayaked for three hours along the lake, we reached a beach where hot water ran out of the ashy sand. The swimming was unique – cold lake water with very hot geothermal patches, and steam rising. And then a long paddle back to the launch site.

We also walked for a few hours on the central desert plateau. Over ash fields and through eroded gullies where water carved deep chasms in the loose and soft ground. Ngauruhoe has a classic stratovolcano shape, conical and reaching to the sky. Nearby, Ruapehu and Tongariro are also stratovolcanoes, but most of their mass is distributed across the central North Island after eons of eruptions and erosion through time.

We sat beside the Lake Taupō caldera, and kept to the paths of the active geothermal field at Craters of the Moon.
Mineral rich steaming volcanic vents are thought to be sites for ‘abiogenesis’, the origins of life.

Rangitoto Island, in Auckland, has been studied by international botanists for the colonising sequence of kidney ferns and pohutukawa, taking root on the rawest of surfaces. In the central plateau, adaptations of ferns, mosses and shrubs like prostrate kanuka grow in arid, hot conditions that also experience heavy snow in places, showing the fortitude of life. Plants found nowhere else, and/or nowhere nearby, flourish in volcanic niches.

On new ground, unique life emerges from heat, minerals and chemicals. Inhospitable environments are no obstacle to the miracle of life. That’s one of the miracles of life itself.