Settled by Polynesian natives around the time of the Crusades, established as a part of the British Commonwealth in the 1800s, and used as the backdrop for the Lord of the Rings movies, New Zealand has been a wonder for all those who have visited. This land, where 30 Lafayette students and two professors were welcomed guests of the Kiwis for two weeks in January, provided spectacular vistas that simply demanded we take pictures of them.
In terms of geology, New Zealand is one of the most active places on the planet. Such activity manifests itself via earthquakes, glaciers, and volcanism. One may think of the typical cone shape seen in Washington State, or the lava rivers seen in Hawaii, but there are only a few of the class of Yellowstone: biosphere killers with caldera craters 50 miles wide. Rotorua is one such supervolcano in the North Island of New Zealand, where still-warm magma flows beneath the fractured planetary crust.
This heat makes its way to the surface and produces warm springs, steam vents, and violently boiling mud pools. During our three-day tour of the North Island, we spent an hour wandering through the "rotten" egg sulfurous blanket permeating the supervolcano. Some of us decided to take a break for a quick dip in a geothermal heated spring. Though the place was neither as black, nor as red, the sense of wandering through the rugged Mordor in Lord of the Rings was prevalent for me. The supervolcano was alive, albeit asleep, and it could change our world in a matter of seconds.
A few days later, we turned to the opposite end of the temperature spectrum. We traveled to the South Island of "Aotearoa" as the native Maori call it, and drove through the Southern Alps to Fox Glacier. After a lecture on glaciers by Professor Dru Germanoski, we hiked up the valley formed by the retreat of the glacier. Eventually the hiking trail led up the side of the cliff immediately next to the glacier, which cut through thick rain forest and where truck-sized boulders crash down through "gun barrels" of valleys daily.
We braved a torrential rainstorm common to that area of New Zealand, but it could not defeat our enthusiasm for walking on one of the four currently advancing glaciers in the world. Yes, we had to spend the remainder of the afternoon blow drying everything we carried with us. However, the feeling of standing on a sheet of ice like one that formed terrain in the American Northeast more than compensated for any discomfort we suffered. Rivers of water twisted, turned, and found crevasses in the ice that led to the depths of the mysterious beast. That water would end up in the braided rivers at which we marveled all across the country of New Zealand.
Where else would one find the Middle Earth of Lord of the Rings? I found it in Rotorua's supervolcano and at Fox Glacier. Others found it near Glenorchy, where the Ents marched on Isengard, discovered it while jumping off a perfectly sound bridge only to be pulled back up by stretchy rope, or even saw the entire land while free falling from an airplane at 15,000 feet. New Zealand is the land of adventure, the land of Middle Earth, and the land containing everything from rainforest to fire and ice.
Civil and Environmental Engineering at Lafayette
Study Abroad at Lafayette
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