There were no more beautiful products of nature upon the earth than those “pink and white terraces,” as they were called. The hot springs of the Yellowstone have produced formations resembling them, but not their equal in fairy-like charm. One series of these terraced pools and cascades was of the purest white tint, the other of the most delicate pink, the waters topping over the edge of each pool and falling in a miniature cascade to the one next below, thus keeping the edges built up by a continual renewal of the silicious incrustation. But all their beauty could not save them from utter and irremediable destruction by the forces below the earth’s surface.
On June 9, 1886, a great volcanic disturbance began in the Auckland Lake region with a tremendous earthquake, followed during the night by many others. At seven the next morning a lead-covered cloud of pumice sand, advancing from the south, burst and discharged showers of fine dust. The range of Mount Tarawera seemed to be in full volcanic activity, including some craters supposed to be extinct, and embracing an area of one hundred and twenty miles by twenty.
The showers of dust were so thick as to turn day into night for nearly two days. Some lives were lost, and several villages were destroyed, these being covered ten feet deep with ashes, dust and clayey mud. The volcanic phenomena were of the most violent character, and the whole island appears to have been more or less convulsed. Mount Tarawera is said to be five hundred feet higher than before the eruption; glowing masses were thrown up into the air, and tongues of fiery hue, gases or illuminated vapors, five hundred feet wide, towered up one thousand feet high. The mountain was 2,700 feet in height.
TARAWERA IN ERUPTION
This eruption presented a spectacle of rarely-equalled grandeur. To travelers and strangers the greatest resultant loss will be the destruction of those world-famous curiosities, the white and pink terraces, in the vicinity of Lake Rotomahana and the region of the famous geysers. The natives have a superstition that the eruption of the extinct Tarawera was caused by the profanation of foreign footsteps. It was to them a sacred place, and its crater a repository for their dead. The first earthquake occurred in this region. One side of the mountain fell in, and then the eruption began. The basin of the lake was broken up and disappeared, but again reappeared as a boiling mud cauldron; craters burst out in various places, and the beautiful terraces were no more. After the first day the violence gradually diminished, and in a week had ceased. Very possibly another lake will be formed, and in time other terraces; but it is hardly within the range of probability that the beauty of the lost terraces will ever be paralleled.
In this eruption, as usual, we find the earthquake preceding the volcanic outburst. New Zealand, like the Philippines, Java and the Japanese Islands, is situated over a great earth-fissure or line of weakness. Subsidence or dislocation from tensile strain of the crust took place, and the influx of water to new regions of heated strata may have developed the explosive force. The earthquake and the volcano worked together here, as they frequently do, unfortunately in this case destroying one of the most beautiful scenes on the surface of the globe.
THE ANTARCTIC VOLCANOES
Much further south, on the frozen shore of Victoria Land in the Antarctic regions, Sir James Ross, in 1841, sailing in his discovery ships the Erebus and Terror, discovered two great volcanic mountains, which he named after those two vessels. Mount Erebus is continually covered, from top to bottom, with snow and glaciers. The mountain is about 12,000 feet high, and although the snow reaches to the very edge of the crater, there rise continually from the summit immense volumes of volcanic fumes, illuminated by the glare of glowing lava beneath them. The vapors ascend to an estimated height of 2,200 feet above the top of the mountain.