The Waimangu Geyser, located near

Rotorua Rotorua () is a city in the Bay of Plenty region of New Zealand's North Island. The city lies on the southern shores of Lake Rotorua, from which it takes its name. It is the seat of the Rotorua Lakes District, a territorial authority encompass ...

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

, was for a time the most powerful

geyser A geyser (, ) is a spring characterized by an intermittent discharge of water ejected turbulently and accompanied by steam. As a fairly rare phenomenon, the formation of geysers is due to particular hydrogeological conditions that exist only in ...

in the world. The Geyser was seen erupting in late 1900. Its eruptions were observed reaching up to in height, and it excited worldwide interest. Day trip visitors from

were keen to see the geyser erupting regularly for 5–6 hours out of a cycle of about 36 hours, and a tourist trip called the "Round Trip" ran from the summer of 1902/1903.Information panel "Waimangu Geyser 1900–1904" at geyser site The geyser was the catalyst for tourism to the Waimangu Valley. Its workings were apparently created by the great 1886

Mount Tarawera Mount Tarawera is a volcano on the North Island of New Zealand within the older but volcanically productive Ōkataina Caldera. Located 24 kilometres southeast of Rotorua, it consists of a series of rhyolitic lava domes that were fissured d ...

eruption. The water expelled by the geyser was black with rocks and mud from the surrounding terrain, so the indigenous

Māori people The Māori (, ) are the indigenous Polynesian people of mainland New Zealand (). Māori originated with settlers from East Polynesia, who arrived in New Zealand in several waves of canoe voyages between roughly 1320 and 1350. Over several ce ...

named the geyser Waimangu, meaning 'Black Waters'. The geyser gave its name to the surrounding geothermal region, the

Waimangu Volcanic Rift Valley The Waimangu Volcanic Rift Valley is the hydrothermal system created on 10 June 1886 by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tarawera, on the North Island of New Zealand. It encompasses Lake Rotomahana, the site of the Pink and White Terraces, as wel ...

. Joseph Perry of the

Limelight Department The Limelight Department was one of the world's first film studios, beginning in 1898, operated by The Salvation Army in Melbourne, Australia. The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including la ...

of the

Salvation Army Salvation (from Latin: ''salvatio'', from ''salva'', 'safe, saved') is the state of being saved or protected from harm or a dire situation. In religion and theology, ''salvation'' generally refers to the deliverance of the soul from sin and its c ...

filmed the Waimangu Geyser in action. In August 1903, tourist guide

Alfred Warbrick Alfred Patchett Warbrick (24 February 1860 – 19 May 1940) was a New Zealand boatbuilder, rugby player and tourist guide. Biography Warbrick was the first of five children of Abraham Warbrick, an English immigrant, and Nga Karauna Paerau, ...

measured the depth of the geyser lake at only when he launched a rowboat on the lake as a result of a dare. The lake's shallow depth was attributed to much of the ejected solid material falling back into the vent each time. On 30 August 1903, New Zealand rugby international

Joe Warbrick Joseph Astbury Warbrick (1 January 1862 – 30 August 1903) was a Māori rugby union player who represented New Zealand on their 1884 tour to Australia and later captained the 1888–89 New Zealand Native football team that embarked on a ...

, David McNaughton, and sisters Ruby and Catherine Nicholls were killed after venturing close to the edge of the geyser, having ignored requests from Warbrick's brother Alfred to return to a safe distance. The four were scalded and then swept away in a sudden violent eruption. In mid-1904, the geyser became dormant for several weeks and subsequent eruptions were shorter and weaker until they stopped on 1 November 1904. This coincided with a

landslide Landslides, also known as landslips, are several forms of mass wasting that may include a wide range of ground movements, such as rockfalls, deep-seated grade (slope), slope failures, mudflows, and debris flows. Landslides occur in a variety of ...

that changed the

water table The water table is the upper surface of the zone of saturation. The zone of saturation is where the pores and fractures of the ground are saturated with water. It can also be simply explained as the depth below which the ground is saturated. T ...

of Lake Tarawera by several metres. While it was hypothesized that this was the cause for the extinction of the geyser, later studies found no apparent physical connection between these two events. The geyser became extinct in 1908. Afterwards, hydrothermal activity in the nearby Echo Crater increased, leading to eruptions in the crater in 1915, 1917, and 1924.

References

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External links

Historical photos of Waimangu Geyser

State Library of Victoria State Library Victoria (SLV) is the state library of Victoria, Australia. Located in Melbourne, it was established in 1854 as the Melbourne Public Library, making it Australia's oldest public library and one of the first free libraries in the ...

Waimangu geyser: the world’s largest
'Hot springs, mud pools and geysers', Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Updated 5 November 2007.
Images of the Waimangu Geyser
from the

Alexander Turnbull Library The National Library of New Zealand ( mi, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) is New Zealand's legal deposit library charged with the obligation to "enrich the cultural and economic life of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations" (''Nat ...

's Unpublished Collections Rotorua Geysers of New Zealand Okataina Volcanic Centre Landforms of the Bay of Plenty Region