A Bird Shangri-La No More: The Moas of New Zealand

Blogging always involves a little bit of free association, where inspiration comes from numerous unrelated events over the course of a few days. I've started my fall semester, and I've met 170 new people over the last week. I've given introductory presentations that describe the reasons a person might want to pursue studies in geology and the earth sciences including a rundown of some of the interesting fossils that have been found in the region. So, I've been thinking about the past, the very deep past of millions of years ago.

Then, I've been blogging over at Geotripper's California Birds about some birding adventures overseas including trips in Switzerland, Italy, and Australia. While looking for bird pics, I came across the picture below of some Moa replicas that we saw at a New Zealand wildlife park. Replicas, because Moas no longer exist in our world. But once there was a Shangri-La for the birds, a paradise on Earth, in New Zealand.

12 foot fiberglass Moas lurking in a Gondwana forest in New Zealand

New Zealand was a paradise for birds because the island mass separated from other continents prior to the mass extinctions of the late Cretaceous. Small mammals were present, but on the islands they were never much of a threat to the birds, and eventually they went extinct, except for some bat species. With the loss of the dinosaurs and the mammals, the only vertebrates in position to dominate the terrestrial ecosystems were the, uh, dinosaurs. The avian dinosaurs. With no reptilian or mammalian predators, the birds were able to evolve a flightless lifestyle (flight is an expensive energy proposition if it is not necessary for survival). Eventually a number of very large birds evolved, including eleven species of Moas. The largest stood over 12 feet tall (3.6 meters). The Moas were mainly plant-eaters but predators existed on the islands as well, including the extremely large Haast's Eagle (Harpagornis moorei) with a wingspan of nearly 10 feet (3.3 meters).

The Moas in the picture above aren't real. I've added a shot of an Emu from the wildlife park we visited as a stand-in for the large, flightless birds

The trees on the island provide another link to the past. Some of the huge tree ferns in New Zealand evoke Jurassic forests of the long-sundered Gondwana supercontinent. The ferns in the photo below line the opening of a 75-foot deep explosion pit at Orakei Korako Geothermal Area on the North Island. I've never such huge ferns before.

The ancient tree that captured my imagination the most was the Kauri tree (below), one of the bulkiest trees on the planet, rivaling even the Sequoia trees in my own backyard of the Sierra Nevada. The most mature trees are not quite 200 feet high, but their trunks remain thick practically to the crown. Their history extends back into Jurassic time. They once covered large portions of the islands, but unfortunately their wood is strong, mostly knot-free, and attractive. Something like 95% of the original forests have been cut down, and old-growth forests are exceedingly rare and precious. The trees are now protected by law, but ironically, dead trees in swamps are not, and the wood is durable enough that some of the trees from the swamps are still utilized legally, despite having been dead for hundreds or thousands of years.

Unfortunately, the arrival of humans on the islands around 700 years ago spelled doom for the avain Shangri-La. Slow-moving, with no defensive instincts, they were hunted to extinction in just a few decades after the human invasion. When they were gone the large raptors lost their primary food source and went extinct as well. Of the flightless birds, only a few species of the Kiwi, the threatened small forest dwelling bird, survives today.

A New Zealand Fan-tail, one of dozens of endemic bird species found in Kiwi land

Geology and paleontology are disciplines for creative and imaginative people. They recreate for us past worlds full of strange and wondrous creatures that are long gone from today's world. There are enough samples of DNA from the extinct Moas that there is a slight hope of bringing them back as living species, but that's probably a long time in the future, if ever. We must live instead with their echoes and the cultural memories and stories of the descendants of the people who once lived among them.

Note: cross-posted on my bird blog at http://geotripperbirds.blogspot.com/

Middle-Earth Here on our Planet? Some Geo-thoughts After the Last Tolkien Movie

Mt. Ruapahu, an active volcano on the North Island of New Zealand

A new world came into being a little over eighty years ago. It formed in the mind of an English scholar, a world with a vivid geography that was populated by a plethora of men, elves, dwarfs, orcs, goblins, dragons, and hobbits. It was a fully realized world with a multitude of unique languages, creation myths, and a long history of wars, strife and horror. At other times it was a world of stunning beauty. I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien as a teenager, and the world revealed in the pages of those books was as vivid in my own mind as the real world I lived in.

From other angles, the summit crater of Ruapahu is clearly seen. A lot of it is missing.

Over the years I could relate the places I had seen in my travels with the geography of Middle Earth. It wasn't hard to see the eastern rampart of the Sierra Nevada near Lone Pine as the mountains of Mordor, or the volcanoes of the Cascades as the Lonely Mountain of Erebor.  But Middle Earth really was unique. I knew of no setting on the planet that could really serve as a stand-in for the product of Tolkien's imagination.

Lake Rotorua sunrise (or the eye of Sauron?). Rotorua occupies an active caldera on the North Island

It is no surprise that it took three quarters of a century to bring the complete Rings trilogy and the Hobbit to the big screen, given the technological hurdles of creating an entire world on film pretty much from scratch. But under the direction of Peter Jackson and a host of others (I sat through the entire credits today at the movie), the world was realized in a total of six movies, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Hobbit broken into thirds. One of the amazing things about Jackson's accomplishment is that he managed to find a fully realized Middle-Earth right here on our own planet: the islands of New Zealand.

A foggy road between Rotorua and Wellington, the closest we came to the filming site of Hobbiton on our trip.

I have found that I can be caught up in the plot of a good movie without losing sight of the choices the directors made for their filming locations. Sometimes it is the recognition of places I know well, which was the case when I watched Wild a few weeks ago. At other times, I am taking in a new landscape, places I have never seen for myself, and wondering where they were filming. And wondering about the underlying geology. In the Tolkien movies, it has mostly been the latter, but I did have one precious opportunity to see parts of the islands of New Zealand, back in 2005. My students and I spent four days on the North Island, and two days on the South Island. It was rushed, we missed many localities I would have liked to have visited, but it was spectacular, and indeed was one of the great journeys of my life.

Tree ferns on the North Island: Echos of the Gondwana flora.

New Zealand is indeed a world apart. It was part of Australia until around eighty million years ago, but it broke away and has been isolated ever since. The non-avian dinosaurs were extirpated here during the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period, and what mammals were present were too small or rare to dominate the ecosystem. The islands of New Zealand became a kingdom of the birds. Many of the larger birds, having no natural enemies besides themselves, evolved away from flight and became surface dwellers. The dominance of the birds ended when humans arrived on the islands around 800 years ago, and in many ways New Zealand came to resemble the rest of the world, with farms and cities, and grazing sheep and cattle.

Yes, there were once birds this big, only a few centuries ago.

The islands of New Zealand are about two-thirds the size of California, and like California the diversity of the landscape is tied to plate tectonics. New Zealand is influenced by convergence of the Australian and Pacific plates, but some areas of the islands are stretching (extending) and others, primarily along the Alpine Fault, are sliding laterally (much like California's San Andreas). As a consequence, the islands have a diverse collection of volcanoes and calderas, a high alpine mountain range, active faults, and glaciers. Given the low density of the population of the islands, a filmmaker has plenty of choices for wilderness locales in which to place their orc armies, wizard castles, and hobbit villages (Middle-Earth always struck me as a rather wilderness world with only a few outposts of civilization).

The north end of the Kaikoura Range on the South Island, very high and rugged, but less known than the Southern Alps.

My greatest disappointment about my trip to New Zealand was the fact that I didn't get to see the Southern Alps up close. The mountains made for some of the most memorable scenes in the Tolkien movies, including the opening sequence of The Two Towers, and lighting of the beacons in The Return of the King. They could be seen in the far distance while we were in Christchurch, and they were briefly visible as we flew over them on the way to Australia, but that was it. I dearly wanted to see them up close, but that will have to come at another time.

So, to Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh and all of the others involved in the production of the movies, I want to say thank you for your vivid imagining of Middle Earth, and your meticulous and careful selection of spectacular filming locales. It added a lot to my enjoyment of the movie, and makes up for your occasional moments of overdoing the special effects (really, Legolas walking up free-falling boulders like a stairway?).

Christchurch, New Zealand Hit by Magnitude 7.0 Quake: Should Californians Pay Attention? What About God?

Update, February 22, 2011:
A horrific aftershock of magnitude 6.3 struck the Christchurch area yesterday, and dozens of people have been killed. I am saddened by the loss of life and hope the best for the survivors. Some may be wondering why the damage is worse with a lesser aftershock. The quake yesterday was closer to Christchurch and more shallow. That alone can account for the great amount of damage, but building damage is also cumulative. Many of the buildings damaged in September had not been fixed or reinforced, and thus were subject to collapse with the newer quake. Please check here for up-to-date geological information.

The original post follows:

Quick, think of a place in the world where a transform boundary has formed a seriously big fault line, a place where folks are waiting for the "Big One", a place where a magnitude 7 quake is not considered the "Big One" (and think of how people don't really want to think about that)....

Not San Francisco Bay! This is Lyttelton Harbour near Christchurch, New Zealand.

If you are one of my local readers, you will be forgiven for thinking of California, where the San Andreas and many other active faults threaten a large population, and where memories of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, the 1994 Northridge quake, the 2003 Paso Robles quake, and the 2010 Baja quake are still raw. But this year, we have seen other places where elements of the geology are similar, and where disastrous earthquakes have occurred. Last January, Haiti was devastated by a magnitude 7.0 quake on a strike-slip (horizontal movement) fault zone along a transform plate boundary in the Caribbean Sea, and yesterday Christchurch and other towns on the Canterbury Plain of the South Island of New Zealand were shaken by a magnitude 7.0 event. There are some chilling comparisons to be made between these events (and the 8.8 magnitude event in Chile last February). Chris at Highly Allochthonous has a nice review of the geological background of the earthquake.

I was saddened to hear of the earthquake in Christchurch, and was relieved that there were so few casualties despite the widespread damage. I was privileged to visit there for all of 24 hours back in 2004, but I found it to be a pleasant town in a beautiful geologic setting. My prayers are with those in the region, because although few were injured, the population faces weeks or months of difficult times. Sewers and water lines, gas mains, and other types of infrastructure were severely affected by the shaking, and as many as 20% of homes are uninhabitable.

There are some similarities between the South Island of New Zealand and California: The Alpine Fault is a large scale strike-slip fault system like the San Andreas, which is capable of producing large earthquakes in the range of magnitude 8 (a related fault on the North Island, near Napier, generated a 7.8 quake in 1931, killing 256 people). Like the San Andreas, a bigger quake is expected in the "near" future along the South Island stretch of the fault zone, the so-called "Big One". There are high mountain ranges, the Southern Alps, and the Kaikouras, that might remind some of the Sierra Nevada, although the geological circumstances are different.
Some comparisons are more harrowing. The Baja quake this year and the one in Christchurch both involved few casualties, despite magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.0 respectively. Yet in Haiti, a 7.0 magnitude quake killed more than 200,000 people. Why? There are a number of factors: the Baja quake was in a lightly populated area, for one. But 500,000 people lived in the area affected by the New Zealand quake yesterday. One difference: the New Zealanders have a history of damaging quakes, and have high architectural standards. In Haiti, it had been 300 years since a large earthquake had taken place, and the country is so poor that they couldn't afford to enforce standards even if they had laws on the books.

Another possibility may have saved a great many lives in New Zealand: the quake may have actually been a complex event involving three different quakes. The first quake may have been a 5.8 magnitude foreshock five seconds before the main shock. Five seconds is an eternity in an earthquake, enough to wake people to full consciousness, and enough time for them to make the right survival decision by taking shelter.

It wasn't long before the word "miracle" popped up in relation to the earthquake in New Zealand. I have a real problem with the use of that word in relation to natural disasters. Miracles are invoked if hardly anyone was hurt, as if God (or the gods) were smiling on the folks where the earthquake was happening. But "miracle" is also a term used when rescuers reach a trapped person days after a quake when thousands of others are dead. What does that mean to the families of those who were killed? Why was one person "chosen"? When dealing with natural disasters, we really have to look at the fact that some societies have the resources and knowledge to protect their citizens, and others, whether from corruption or external economic factors, do not. If someone survives a disaster, it is often the result of planning, education, and available resources.

Some of the most despicable people on this planet are the ones like the 'evangelist' Pat Robertson who are so quick to declare that natural disasters are the judgement of God upon people. Mr. Robertson rather stupidly declared that the Haiti earthquake happened because of a pact with the devil 200 some years ago. Why would anyone worship a god so capricious and inefficient that he waits 200 years to get around to punishing the children of the children of the children of the people who committed some kind of sin? Picking and choosing the reasons for a particular natural disaster in regards to the judgement of a deity is a dangerous and evil pathway that will someday come back on you.

My religious and ethical beliefs speak of the equality and value of each human being on this planet, but our planet is not a very equal place. Sometimes, certain citizens of the richest countries have an arrogance and sense of entitlement that is not actually particularly deserved. Any of us could become a victim of a natural disaster at any time. Haiti is still in a desperate place; have you donated anything lately to help?

Postscript: See this article in "Ask The Pilot" for a perspective on "miracles" in plane accidents.

Postscript 2: An excellent post on the fault offsets on the Canterbury Plain, with maps and photos can be found here.

Another "Miss"-Adventure, and why I'm busy these days

A "miss"-adventure: missing the chance to see something important by mis-scheduling, missing a turnoff, getting rained or snowed out. One more story explains the lack of blogging for a bit.

In 2003, I was casting about for another international trip, and settled on a tour of Australia and New Zealand. The company offering the tour had a great line-up of sites, even though it was not directly geology-related. It was really expensive, since a company's gotta make a profit, after all, but how could one beat a tour of both islands of New Zealand (only missed the glaciers, a big "only"), BUT, once in Australia, we would see the Blue Mountains (pictured above), a north Australian rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, and as a grand climax, we would fly to the interior of the Outback, and see the greatest inselberg in the world: Uluru, or Ayer's Rock. What a great way to end the adventure...

We got 35 students together a year in advance, got several thousand dollars of non-refundable deposits, paid the company and looked forward to our adventure. The trip material arrived a few months later, and...presto! Uluru was gone from the schedule, with no explanation. The company barely had e-mail, and an explanation was days in coming, having to do with airlines changing their schedules and bureaucratic difficulties and would you like a few days in Fiji instead?

So, non-refundable deposits have a reason. Sucker that I am, we continued on the trip, and despite many management problems from the lousy company, our students had a good time, and we did see a lot. But who knows when or if I will ever have a chance to see the Olga Rocks and Uluru?

What's the moral? If you want to see everything you want to see on an overseas field trip, well, you have to plan and conduct it yourself. Thus, the spotty blogging. I'm leaving on a field trip in a few weeks to the Hawaiian Islands (three of them), and I am running the trip myself, with the help of some gracious volunteers. It's a lot more work, but it will be a great deal cheaper, and we will be able to see everything that is great about the island's geology.

Aloha!

A Present-Day Gondwanaland Forest

I am using today's post as a bridge back to my continuing story of the real Jurassic Parks (and Cretaceous Parks) on the Colorado Plateau in the southwestern United States. But those parks are in mostly desert environments today, and it can sometimes take a lot of imagination to see the tropical forests that existed in the region during Jurassic or Cretaceous time (of course, imagination is not a bad thing). On the other hand, there is a place in the world that has been detached from any other continent for more than 80 million years, thus preserving some elements of the Mesozoic ecosystems that existed at the time. There was a lot more to see just an achingly short time in the past, only a few hundred years ago.

I am speaking of New Zealand, land of kiwis and hobbits (thank you Peter Jackson, I enjoyed the movies a lot)

New Zealand consists mainly of two major islands, divided from each other across the narrow Cook Strait. The North Island includes Auckland, a city built on dozens of volcanoes, Rotorua, a geyser wonderland sitting in the midst of a huge caldera complex, and the big active volcanoes including Ruapahu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro. The South Island includes the city of Christchurch, and a series of spectacular mountain ranges including the Southern Alps (remember the spectacular opening sequence of "The Two Towers"?), and the Kaikoura Range that drops 9,000 feet right into the Pacific Ocean (sort of like Big Sur, but three times higher).

Because the island mass separated from other continents prior to the mass extinctions of the late Cretaceous, mammals were present, but never evolved to dominate the ecosystems as they did elsewhere in the world, and eventually went extinct, except for some bat species. With the loss of the dinosaurs, the only vertebrates in position to take over the terrestrial habitat were the birds. With no reptilian or mammalian predators, the birds were able to evolve a flightless existence (flight is an expensive energy proposition if it is not necessary for survival). Eventually a number of very large birds evolved, including ten species of moas. The largest stood over 9 feet tall. They were mainly plant-eaters, but an extremely large eagle lived on the island as the top predator.

Unfortunately, the arrival of humans on the islands around 700 years ago spelled doom for the moas, and when they were gone the large raptors lost a main food source and went extinct as well. Only the kiwi, the small forest dwelling bird, survives today.

The trees on the island provide the other link to the past. I have included some of the huge tree ferns that evoke Jurassic forests in the pictures above (the moas aren't real. Really). The ferns in the third photo line the opening of a 75-foot deep explosion pit at Orakei Korako Geothermal Area on the North Island. I really would not have been surprised if we had been attacked by a few velociraptors in the forest there...

The ancient tree that captured my imagination the most was the Kauri tree (second photo), one of the bulkiest trees on the planet, rivaling even the Sequoia trees in my own backyard of the Sierra Nevada. The most mature trees are not quite 200 feet high, but their trunks remain thick practically to the crown. Their history extends back into Jurassic time. They once covered much of the islands, but unfortunately their wood is strong, mostly knot-free, and attractive. Something like 95% of the original forests have been cut down, and old-growth forests are exceedingly rare and precious. The trees are now protected by law, but ironically, dead trees in swamps are not, and the wood is durable enough that some of the trees from the swamps are still utilized legally, despite having been dead for hudreds or thousands of years.