The Pouakai Range is an eroded and heavily vegetated stratovolcano in the North Island of

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 ...

, located northwest of

Mount Taranaki Mount Taranaki (), also known as Mount Egmont, is a dormant stratovolcano in the Taranaki region on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island. It is the second highest point in the North Island, after Mount Ruapehu. The mountain has a seco ...

. It consists of the remains of a collapsed

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...

stratovolcano. The range is surrounded by a ring plain of lahar deposits from a massive collapse that has been dated as roughly 250,000 years old. The region has been reshaped more recently after each cone collapse from

Geology

The Pouakai Range volcano is situated in the

Taranaki Basin The Taranaki Basin is an onshore-offshore Cretaceous rift basin on the West Coast of New Zealand. Development of rifting was the result of extensional stresses during the breakup of Gondwanaland. The basin later underwent fore-arc and intra-arc b ...

and is part of the Taranaki Volcanic Lineament which has had a 30 mm/yr north to south migration over the last 1.75 million years. Present-day seismicity and stress directions in eastern Taranaki are consistent with back-arc extension processes. The Taranaki Volcanic Lineament members as they decrease in age from northwest to southeast are: # Paritutu, and the Sugar Loaf Islands from 1.75 Ma # Kaitake from 575 ka #Pouakai 210–250 ka #

<200 ka

Volcanic activity

"After the extinction of the Kaitake center, eruptions broke out at Pouakai 6 miles south-east of Kaitake. Activity from this center continued over a long period of ring-plain formation, a period of marine erosion during which volcanic activity decreased, and part way through another period of ring-plain building, before activity broke out from the next center." It can be postulated that that all volcanoes in the Taranaki Volcanic Lineament have had a similar potential for instability and were stratovolcanoes of similar size and shape to the present Mount Taranaki between major collapse events given their debris plains. They may well have had major collapse cycles similar to that presently shown by

which is a potential maximum size of collapse of every 30,000 to 35,000 years.

Nearby volcanoes

* Sugar Loaf Islands * Kaitake Volcano * Taranaki Volcano

References

{{reflist Mountain ranges of Taranaki Volcanoes of Taranaki Stratovolcanoes of New Zealand Pleistocene stratovolcanoes