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Accessibility: DIFFICULT
WHAT'S HERE?
The tip of the ice cave lava mold, with fine columnar joints on all sides / GNS
This amazing amphitheater view of a waterfall on the Whangaehu river gives a glimpse of how lava interacted with the glacier that was filling the valley.
LEARN ABOUT IT
A sheet of finely jointed lava that got down beside the glacier forming a knuckle / GNS
This beautiful (but complicated) location shows many features of lava that had frozen against and within a glacier. This was during the last glaciation and there was a thick glacier draining from the top of Ruapehu down the Whangaehu Valley (and the other valleys around Ruapehu). To the right of this glacier (right in the photo) a ridge of lava and moraine was building next to the glacier, kept out of the valley by the ice.
See the caption of the annotated image for more detail: The waterfall is coming over a finger of lava that froze inside a melt-water tunnel inside the glacier. You can tell it 'quenched' against ice and meltwater because of the fine (10cm scale) columns radiating in all directions, touching the now-melted ice. Underneath is the till (glacial deposit) from under and beside the glacier. To the right are the thin lava flows, one of which fed into the tunnel 'finger', and others thickened to 'knuckles' in little embayments in the ice. In the Holocene (last 10,000 years) lava from Crater Lake has flowed down the middle of the valley unimpeded and this sits as the cliff at the left.
See the caption of the annotated image for more detail: The waterfall is coming over a finger of lava that froze inside a melt-water tunnel inside the glacier. You can tell it 'quenched' against ice and meltwater because of the fine (10cm scale) columns radiating in all directions, touching the now-melted ice. Underneath is the till (glacial deposit) from under and beside the glacier. To the right are the thin lava flows, one of which fed into the tunnel 'finger', and others thickened to 'knuckles' in little embayments in the ice. In the Holocene (last 10,000 years) lava from Crater Lake has flowed down the middle of the valley unimpeded and this sits as the cliff at the left.
HAVE A LOOK!
Fine fractured grey lava quenched against wet glacial till. D.Townsend / GNS
Can you visualise the ice filling the entire image, and imagine the finger of lava inside a tube? Can you trace which thin lava flow at the right fed the finger?
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Directions/Advisory
Start from Tukino Skifield, which requires 4WD to access up the track from Desert Road
The view point here is on a cliff. Wear good tramping footwear for the rugged terrain
Google Directions
Accessibility:
DIFFICULT
Come up the valley from the east. There is a climbing route just to the west from Tukino ski area, but this is 'very difficult'
Features
Volcanic
Active Erosion
Geological Age
Last glaciation.
Zealandia Evolution Sequence
Pākihi Supergoup: 5 million years ago – present
Links