White Island Could Blow It’s Top

Image courtesy Flickr user Simon Clayson

Geologists have warned that Whakaari/White Island near to blowing it’s top. The water temperature of the crater lake is 74°c, the hottest ever recorded, the level of the crater lake has plunged buy 6m, signaling a possible imminent eruption.

The Island is almost 50km off the coast of a small town where I used to live called Whakatane (pronounced fuck-a-taney), circular in shape, about 2km in diameter, and is only 321m above sea level [Yahoo! Maps Link]. However this is only the peak of a much larger submarine mountain, which rises up to 1600m above the nearby seafloor. When I lived in Whakatane I could see it from my office. Major eruptions between 1981–83 altered much of the island’s landscape and decimated the extensive pōhutukawa [wiki] forest. The large crater created after the erruption time has become a lake. White island last erupted in 2000. After the eruption a plume of ash and steam could be seen from the island for many years, but the crater lake since has filled up with water and mud, capping the volcano, causing a pressure build-up.

The island is remotely monitored by Volconologists by Surveilance Cameras, Survey pegs, magnetometers and seismograph equipment for early earthquake warnings via radio have also been installed on the crater walls. The island is usually on an alert level rating of 1 or 2 on a scale of 1–5. In may 2004 John Callan of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) wrote the the New Zealand Herald column Sidswipe.

Some wag has glued a pink dinosaur in front of our digital camera on White Island in the Bay of Plenty. The camera takes a pic of the White Island crater every hour and puts it on the GeoNet website – for all to see. A number of people have been emailing us asking what the dinosaur is all about. I advise them that ‘Dino’ has assumed the role of White Island mascot and protector of our volcano monitoring equipment. We at GNS hope Dino sticks around for a while, but we doubt he will have the staying power of his ancestors. The acid environment on White Island gives plastic a fairly hard time.”

The camera can be viewed on the GeoNet webcam, and dino is still there.

Image courtey Flickr user Xole

Attempts were made in the mid 1880s, 1898-1901 and 1913-1914 to mine sulphur from Whakaari but the last of these came to a halt in September 1914, when part of the western crater rim collapsed, creating a lahar which killed all 10 workers. They disappeared without trace, and only the camp cat (named Peter the Great) survived. Some years later in 1923 mining was again attempted, but learning from the 1914 disaster, the miners built their huts on a flat part of the island near a gannet colony. Each day they would lower their boat into the sea from a gantry (a kind of tripod with a boom) and row around to the mining factory wharf in Crater Bay. If the sea was rough they had to clamber around the rocks on a very narrow track on the crater’s edge. Sulphur before the days of antibiotics was used in medicines as an antibacterial agent, in the making of match heads, and for sterilising wine corks. The miner’s diggings were handled in small rail trucks to the crushing and bagging process in the factory built on the island. Unfortunately, there was not enough sulphur at Whakaari and so the ground up rock was used as a component of agricultural fertiliser. Eventually the mining ended in the 1930s because of the poor mineral content in the fertiliser. The remains of the buildings can still be seen, much corroded by the sulphuric gasses.

Whakaari is privately owned and was declared a private scenic reserve in 1953 and is subject to the provision of the Reserves Act 1977. Visitors cannot land without permission or remove or disturb any wildlife and must leave only their footprints.

However, it is easily accessible by authorized tourist operators. Weather permitting a luxury motor launch leaves Whakatane daily for a six-hour day trip. Children should be aged over eight years. Helicopter trips are also available from Rotorua and Whakatane.

See the original article on my blog www.ross.chrystall.co.nz. Some of the info in this article is from Wikipedia and the New Zeland Herald.