Geopark - Sasha  - Zealandia

Real Radio: Time to talk Geopark. Joined by the Geoeducator Sasha. What are we talking about this week, Sasha?

Geoeducator: Well, this week I want to just discuss what I did over the weekend. I went out to Vanished World at Duntroon and I met up with a whole lot of their volunteers out there. If you haven't been out to Vanished World, take a trip. It's great - the volunteers are really knowledgeable and you can look around the centre there as well as do the good old Vanished World trail. You get a little map and it's a wee driving trail that you can do to look at various sites in the area. And there's little display boards at each site that describe what you're looking at and how it fits in with the story of New Zealand and the Waitaki District. Now what I was going there specifically to do at Vanished World was not only to meet the volunteers, but to meet one of the new staff members out there. Now they're going to be working two days a week at Vanished World to bring together all the electronic information that they've got just to make things a little bit more concise for people out there and the educators that they have out there. One of my other priorities out here on Saturday was to give a bit of a talk to the people, the volunteers there about Zealandia. Now, I've spoken before on the radio about Zealandia. So Zealandia is the continent that New Zealand rests on. In the past we've been told New Zealand is an island nation, however, science has recently shown that New Zealand is (the land part of New Zealand) is only the very, very narrow apex of a large continent called Zealandia. Now, Zealandia extends all the way up through New Caledonia, all the way out to the Chatham Islands and down further south. So there's no real definitional criteria to be called a continent, but it's rather a convention. So the more people that pick up the idea of Zealandia, the more that it will get generally accepted as a scientific fact. Now, how they've come to determine Zealandia or to define Zealandia has been about 20 years worth of research done. So on earth you have a continental crust and oceanic crust. Now continental crust is a lighter density, it has a different composition to oceanic crust and it kind of sits higher on the mantle. Now they've discovered that the crust that makes up Zealandia actually sits a lot higher than the surrounding oceanic crust, and it's different composition. So if we were to drain all the waters out of the oceans surrounding New Zealand, you would see this beautiful continent of New Zealand. So while at the moment we tend to think of New Zealand ending at the beach, it actually extends way out further. That is actually buried underneath the sea. So it's really exciting research that's come out. And we're going to be holding a series of public talks throughout the year with someone from GNS coming to talk about Zealandia. So look out on our website - we'll be publishing those in the coming months as to the schedule. And send in any questions that you've got and I'll attempt to answer them. If I can't, we'll get somebody from GNS to be able to address your questions. But I encourage people to come along to these talks and hear more about this amazing continent that we live on. Zealandia.

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