New Zealand: Waimangu Volcanic Valley

Five years ago today, on our second trip to New Zealand, we spent some hours in the Waimangu Volcanic Valley in the geothermally active area near Rotorua on the North Island. What you might take for low clouds in the top picture of Cathedral Rocks is steam.

The yellow in the second photograph, like the frequent odor we noticed in the air around Rotorua, comes from sulphur. I don’t know what made the green. The last picture shows what’s called Frying Pan Lake. While the water’s a pretty blue, the steam says a swim there would be your last anywhere.

 

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Respect for reason has waxed and waned throughout history. Today, its tide is receding. University professors resign in frustration from what were once our bastions of rationality. Increasingly, the barbarians are not merely at the gates, but running the show in a vast swathe of humanities departments. After decades of decay in our academic training grounds, radical identitarianism and other irrationalities are spreading with accelerating speed, and we are woefully short of thinkers capable of fighting them.

That’s the beginning of a good article by John Hersey about reasoning entitled “Five Lessons from Julia Galef’s ‘The Scout Mindset.’” Check it out. Links in that article lead to other good ones.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: colors at Waimangu Volcanic Rift Valley

A year ago today we spent a few hours at the Waimangu Volcanic Rift Valley in Rotorua. One thing that caught my attention was the small geyser shown above. The second photograph shows the colors adjacent to the geyser. (You can connect the two pictures using the log common to both.)

And here are other nearby colors:

But nothing there beat the color of Inferno Crater Lake:

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: the mountain steams, the water steams

Frying Pan Lake in the Waimangu Volcanic Rift Valley on New Zealand’s North Island is “deadly scalding and one of the largest hot springs in the world.” We visited it on March 5th. Below is a closer view of the shallows along one edge of the lake.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Water colors at Waimangu Volcanic Rift Valley

On our 2015 New Zealand trip we’d visited two geothermal attractions in the Rotorua area but had run out of time for more. On March 5th of this year we spent a few hours at a third one, the Waimangu Volcanic Rift Valley. How about the vivid color of the water at Inferno Crater Lake? And look at the very different color of another lake there:

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Two steam-capped geothermal sites

Today marks the beginning of the fifth and last set of photographs from the great February visit to New Zealand.

The first picture is from Te Puia on February 23rd. I expected to see areas of yellow attributable to sulfur, but the pale reddish rocks farther out came as a surprise.

And speaking of colors, how about the green and orange that I found together along one margin of the Champagne Pool at Wai-O-Tapu on February 24th?

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Yet another pair of geothermal formations at Te Puia on February 23rd

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Two more geothermal formations from Te Puia on February 23rd

 

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Elephantine

On February 23rd I spent a few hours at Te Puia, one of the geothermal attractions in Rotorua. Of the rock surfaces there, this one particularly fascinated me with its “eye” and its texture, both of which now strike me as elephantine.

UPDATE: I should have noted that there are four pronunciations for the word elephantine, which you’ll see listed (and can listen to by clicking the little speaker icons) at Oxford Dictionaries.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Sulfur and steam

Here begins the fourth and penultimate installment of photographs from the great February trip to Aotearoa, known in English as New Zealand.

At Te Puia, one of the geothermal attractions in Rotorua, I photographed this formation on February 23rd. Yellow is generally an indication of sulfur, and steam is generally an indication of hot water.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Lady Knox Geyser

Here’s a view of the Lady Knox Geyser after it was induced to go off on the morning of February 24th at Wai-O-Tapu in the geothermal region near Rotorua.

If you’re interested in photography as a craft, you’ll find that points 6 and 7 in About My Techniques are relevant to this photograph.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman