New Zealand Geographic is partnering with Rolex to bring readers a new series of solutions-based journalism. Publisher James Frankham explains more.
New Zealand Geographic and Heritage Expeditions invite readers to experience the rawness, beauty and abundant wildlife of Stewart Island/Rakiura - 'the land of glowing skies' - and Ulva Island/Te Wharawhara in October, on an exclusive eight-day expedition with a yet-to-be-announced New Zealand Geographic expert sharing their knowledge.
It’s 8pm in Auckland on February 13 and Cyclone Gabrielle is winding up. Over the hill from us families are being evacuated—the old-man pines that hold the cliffs up are falling. We’re fine, but it’s weird. Sirens in the background. I’m getting up every two minutes to check the trampoline, the willow, the kids. During lockdown, if the kids or I were feeling anxious, we’d head for the weedy bush gully at the bottom of our street. There’s a bridge to drop sticks off, dragonflies. The kids discovered a cluster of baby ponga and came back each day to watch the fronds unfurl. When we found a ruru dead on the road, we carried it to that special spot by the stream, and buried it. The gully was squashed under a slip in the floods that came a fortnight ago. This is what climate change feels like to me: a convergence of new and startling happenings, once-in-a-lifespan events that now shunt into one another and overlap, a state of ambient emergency. And hunger, if you’re a rockhopper penguin on the Antipodes. “We should use the list of NZ’s biggest climate polluters to rename this year’s climate disasters,” someone tweeted the other day, snapshotting a top-10 chart compiled by the Environmental Protection Authority. Cyclone Fonterra? Cyclone Z Energy? As the American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit said in a speech at Princeton University last year: “Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else... A climate story we urgently need is one that exposes who is actually responsible for climate chaos.” It’s not individuals making bad choices as consumers, Solnit argues. It’s the fossil fuel industry and the fact that, given the stakes, there are still bad choices available. I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. Why not demand change on both fronts? We should expect the people who can make sustainable choices to do so—to go solar, take the bus, cut back on meat and milkshakes. At the same time, we should push the system to change, fast—true systemic change is not a pipe dream. Look at cigarette smoking, seatbelts, smacking kids, free-range eggs, plastic shopping bags. (Aucklanders, one way to effect real change is to make a submission, this March, on Auckland Council’s 2023/24 annual budget proposals—Search ‘AK Have Your Say’). Meanwhile, we need to wrap our arms around the people whose choices are limited and those who, like our baby ponga, face being hammered and hammered again. Too often, these two groups overlap. The RSE orchard workers left stranded on their rooftops for 10 hours out the back of Taradale. The people of Rānui, west Auckland, who dragged their sodden couches and carpets out to the kerb just in time to catch the next wallop of weather. Wairoa. Gisborne. Northland. Muriwai. And most of all, everywhere: our kids. As the wind picked up tonight, my eldest asked for a bedtime story, for the first time in months. He chose one called Kōwhai and the Giants, about a Lorax-like little girl desperate to save New Zealand’s trees. “I cannot do it alone,” says Kōwhai. “And when I speak, my voice is not heard.” He lay awake for a long time after that.
What’s it like to be a cockle or a pipi when the sea turns to chocolate milk? Juveniles suffocate in even a thin layer of sediment, says Simon Thrush, head of the University of Auckland’s Institute of Marine Science. Adults “hold their breath” for a couple of days, then have to resume feeding—in water so full of sediment and pollutants it often kills them. In thicker layers of mud, like here at Sandspit after January’s floods, even worms “just get stuck and die. It’s gruesome.” New regulations introduced by Auckland Council in 2019 aimed to limit sediment from land development over the 12,000 building sites active each year. Last year, officers cited more than 82 per cent compliance—yet this summer of extreme rain events has defied all attempts to mitigate the runoff.
Pyroclastic surges—super-heated and fast-flowing clouds of gas and rock fragments—represent the deadliest risk from Auckland’s volcanic field. Previous hazard assessments assumed such surges would travel up to six kilometres, but a new study of the Ubehebe crater in California’s Death Valley shows they extend much further, and future assessments should consider distances of 10–15 kilometres from the vent. University of Otago volcanologist James White says Ubehebe’s eruption was similar to those of some of Auckland’s volcanoes where magma and water mixed to trigger more violent explosions, known as phreatomagmatic. But the Death Valley’s dry environment preserved the pyroclastic deposits exceptionally well, tracing them to at least nine kilometres. Pyroclastic surges are lubricated by a low-friction air cushion which allows them to move across any terrain. White says the somewhat cooler—albeit still lethally hot—surges from magma-water eruptions can travel even greater distances. “What hazard managers are going to be worried about is not distance but area—extending the diameter even by two or three kilometres adds a lot of area.”
It’s harder than you’d think for a new COVID-19 variant to take off in New Zealand, says Jo Chapman, a senior scientist at the Institute of Environmental Science and Research wastewater testing program. “Variants have to be both fit and good at growing, but also lucky—to find a pathway through the community and get a foothold.” Still, enough of them have made it through that we now have a “variant soup”. Initially wastewater testing was an early warning system—it told us where COVID-19 was stealthily spreading. Now, it’s an unbiased way of monitoring trends. The new ESR website poops.nz lets laypeople take a nosy at the data too, even zooming down to the level of a single street or two. Yes, you can now see what’s in your neighbourhood poo.
Your favourite summer surf break may fizzle out by the end of the century as a result of climate change, according to new modelling led by University of Auckland scientist João Albuquerque. Shifting wind patterns will drive slightly bigger west coast waves, while east coast breakers are set to diminish by up to 20 per cent. Seasonal patterns will fluctuate too, with summer and autumn swells smaller than today’s, while winter and spring will see them ramp up. But it’s not just surf forecasts that will flip-flop: wave directions will shift, too. These altered angles of inundation will impact coastal communities, eroding and flooding different parts of the coast. The projected changes remain subtle up to 2045, but are expected to become “more severe” between 2080 and 2100, Albuquerque says.
Faeces have a lot to teach us. They can reveal secrets about the lives of extinct animals, and the troubles of endangered ones. Eating dung can give animals a nutrient boost—while in the oceans, a deluge of plankton poo powers the entire carbon cycle.
Anne Wignall is on a mission to reduce her peak time electricity usage to zero. And thanks to her solar system, battery, and Electric Kiwi’s MoveMaster plan with a free Hour of Power, she’s getting closer to reaching that goal.
After the rain came for Northland and Auckland, Cyclone Gabrielle made landfall. It was a sobering test.
Flying robots are taking to the skies in greater numbers—performing tasks such as tracking critically endangered Māui dolphins and collecting data on extreme weather events. But they can’t fly well in windy conditions, and don’t have the battery capacity to power long flights. Birds, on the other hand, can wheel and soar in even the most turbulent conditions, exploiting wind energy to fly effortlessly. In a new paper, birds provide inspiration to make drones more adaptable and energy efficient. Researchers suggest mimicking flying strategies such as vultures circling in thermal updrafts (below, D, E), or birds exploiting updrafts created by the likes of cliffs or buildings (F). “Dynamic soaring” strategies seen in gulls, kites and crows could inspire drones programmed to be more reactive to subtler air patterns. These include surfing wind gusts (above, A), sweeping close to the sea surface on the updraft of a long wave (B), or looping in the eddies off the tip of a sharp ridge (C).
Every year, New Zealand vessels drag trawl gear across nearly 100,000 square kilometres of our seafloor. We are the only nation still trawling on the high seas of the South Pacific. Can we make bottom trawling better? Or should we ban it altogether?
We cull hybrids. We steal their eggs, and break up inter-species breeding pairs, all in the name of genetic integrity. Protecting the mauri. We created this tangle by bringing in exotic species. Can we ever undo it? And should we even try?
Range anxiety, charging locations, higher power bills… There’s a lot to think about when buying an electric vehicle. But Electric Kiwi has a grand plan to help ease those concerns, writes Chris Schulz.
Some animals are ephemeral. Others are almost eternal. Some age gracefully, while others self-destruct. Why are some creatures here for a good time, and others for a long time?
As comets streak across the night sky, their radiant heads often glow green—but not their long tails. In the 1930s, physicist Gerhard Herzberg suggested that the lime halo may be produced by sunlight destroying diatomic carbon, C2. But because diatomic carbon is so unstable, no one on Earth has been able to test that theory—until now. Researchers in Australia used a vacuum chamber and powerful lasers to simulate the comet environment, proving that the breakdown of C2 produces the emerald hue.
A pivotal scene in the superhero movie Avengers: Infinity War involves one character snapping his fingers while wearing a metal gauntlet. It made biophysicist Saad Bhamla wonder: would it actually be possible to snap your fingers while wearing such a glove? Turns out, no one had explored the physics of the finger snap, so Bhamla and his colleagues at Georgia Tech in the United States filmed a finger snap in ultra-slow motion. The key to a successful finger snap is skin friction, which is partly created by the squishiness of the finger pads. Skin friction builds up energy like a compressed spring, then releases it quickly to fuel rapid motion. During a finger snap, the middle finger rotates about 20 times faster than the blink of a human eye, and when it hits the palm, the impact creates a mini-shockwave, producing that characteristic pop. Researchers failed to snap while wearing slippery gloves or stiff metal thimbles, while bare skin created the perfect amount of friction. The verdict: Thanos’s snap wasn’t possible according to actual physics, but researchers admitted they could not account for the supernatural powers of the gauntlet.
If you sail west from California for nearly a week you’ll end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Then the plastic starts bobbing past—a buoy, a bucket, a net, a toothbrush, microplastics floating like bubbles—tens of thousands of tonnes of it spread over an estimated 1.6 million square kilometres.
Almost all animals sleep—insects, mammals, even jellyfish and sponges. Some of them even dream. But what is sleep for, and how has it shaped us?
The University of Canterbury’s Bachelor of Environmental Science with Honours is a hands-on, transformative degree that empowers students to tackle some of the most urgent sustainability issues facing our world today.
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