NZ +20: Geothermal... now in Colour!

Now I don't want to bore you with more geothermal stuff, but after Hell's Gate, which was very dramtic and eerie and grey, I thought I should tell you about Wai-O-Tapu, which is the same deal geothermically, but a lot more touristy and more colourful. And so really should make for better photos. There is also a geyser...



It's called the Lady Knox Geyser. She was Lady Clarence Knox and she was either the wife or the daughter of a former Governor-General of the Dominion, posted here from the Motherland to rule over the natives.

Now, what they natives had already discovered was this..

The geyser has loads of boiling hot water in it, and so it would be good for washing clothes. The bunged their clothes in and some soap and were amazed to find that roughly three minutes later, the geyser blew 15m into the air and shot their clothes over a fairly large radius.

Concentrate, here's the science bit.

The water is bubbling away under pressure in two chambers below the ground and eventually the pressure builds up enough for the geyser to explode. But it's erratic, happening roughly every two to three days. And that, a predictable tourist attraction doth not make...

Perhaps you can link together things I've already told you and work out what happens...

Every morning at 10.15 precisely, a bloke comes out and addresses an audience of about 200 people who've all paid $25 to get in...



...and he tips soap powder into the top and stands back. As the Maoris found out, soap lowers the surface tension of the water underground so it needs less pressure to burst forth. And then it does...



It's quite impressive, if a bit soapy...



Rather more impressive, and more natural, are the boiling mud pools a bit up the road. They are really unpredictable and no-one has to tip anything into them to get them to work...



Because they are unpredicatble, the really scary, big, think-I-was-going-to-get-covered-in-boiling-mud explosion was not captured on film (not that it would have been anyway, it being a digital camera).



And then it was off into the park proper, which is really the same deal as Hell's Gate, but prettier. It was really the Geothermal Park of Many Colours. Being slightly red/green colour blind and always making a hash of describing colours, I shall let you enjoy without trying to interpret...











And I promise that's all the geothermal stuff for this holiday. Probably.

Although, it's no big deal anyway. Southampton has had geothermal energy for ages and tourists don't come to see that. I wonder why?