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A little
fishing village on the coast south of Oamaru has become famous for a
geological wonder on its windswept sands.
Moeraki itself is a charming fishing
village, much quieter today than its riotous past as an early
whaling station. The Kotahitanga Church (1862) contains
beautiful stained glass windows that were made in Rome,
depicting Christ, Mother and Child and an elderly Maori leader
Matiaha Tiramorehu, a local chief.
Take the beach walk to the
startling Moeraki boulders, 60 million years old and nestled like
eggs into the sand on the coastline. The sea is slowly eroding the
boulders and uncovering new ones - some are up to four metres in
circumference.
"Moeraki, on the east coast of the
South Island, south of
Oamaru , is known world wide for its famous boulders. The
boulders formed over millions of years, but Moeraki has a human
history only a few hundred years old.
The Moeraki
Spheres are huge spherical stones that are scattered over the sandy
beaches, but they are not like ordinary round boulders that have
been shaped by rivers and pounding seas. These boulders are classed
as septarian concretions, and were formed in ancient sea floor
sediments. They were created by a process similar to the formation
of oyster pearls, where layers of material cover a central nucleus
or core. For the oyster, this core is an irritating grain of sand.
For the boulders, it was a fossil shell, bone fragment, or piece of
wood. Lime minerals in the sea accumulated on the core over time,
and the concretion grew into perfectly spherical shapes up to three
meters in diameter.
The original
mudstone seabed has since been uplifted to form coastal cliffs.
Erosion of the cliffs has released the three ton captive boulders,
which now lie in a haphazard jumble across the beach. Further
erosion in the atmosphere has exposed a network of veins, which
gives the boulders the appearance of turtle shells. Similar boulders
occur at Shag Point, and the nearby swimming beach of Katiki. In
Hawke’s Bay in the North Island, scientists have found that the
central core of similar boulders contained perfectly preserved
skeletons of turtles, sea snails and extinct reptiles, such as
plesiosaurs.
Moeraki has
a long history of Maori occupation, which is represented in the town
today by the Kotahitanga Maori Church and a pa site nearby. This
small seaport town was the first European settlement in North Otago.
Behind the town a road leads to the lighthouse where you can find a
yellow-eyed penguin sanctuary and a seal colony. There are other
walks of ecological interest around the coast, and through the
Trotter’s Gorge native forest. South of Moeraki is the town of
Palmerston, where you can follow an historical scenic route to
Central Otago.
Moeraki
makes a fascinating stopover point, both for the dramatic coastal
scenery and the curious geological phenomenon on the beaches.
New Zealand Mythology:
This history goes back as far as the
legendary Arai-te-uru canoe, wrecked along the coast while
searching for the precious stone of Te Wai Pounamu. The reef,
which extends seaward near Shag Point represents the hull of the
canoe. The huge boulders strewn along Moeraki Beach represent the
eel baskets ... and the strangely shaped irregular rocks the
kumara. Some of the crew reached land safely, but were overtaken
by dawn and turned into hills which bear their names".
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Scattered along the beach at Moeraki which is some 40 kilometers
south of Oamaru, the boulders are a popular visitor attraction.
The soft mudstone containing the boulders was raised from the sea
bed around 15 million years ago and sea erosion of the cliff is
exposing the erosion-resistant boulders.
Emerging
from the cliff, as if being born from the earth, the World famous
Moeraki Boulders are septerian concretions formed some 65 million
years ago. Crystallization of calcium and carbonates around charged
particles in muddy undersea sediments gradually formed the boulders
in a process taking as long as four million years. |
