PAGES New Zealand

Welcome to PAGES New Zealand

  
Figure 1. Onepoto maar crater on the north shore of Auckland city, New Zealand. This crater is infilled with lacustrine and estuarine sediments, with the latter deposited since postglacial sea-level rise resulted in the crater rim being breached ca 8000 yr BP.
Figure 2. Coring Lake Pupuke, a 57 m deep maar lake on the north shore of Auckland, New Zealand. A complete sequence spanning the last 50,000 years now exists with dating and correlation simplified by the identification of 40 known age rhyolitic and andesitic tephra. Both Onepoto and Pupuke maars were formed ca 250,000 years ago and contain in excess of 25 m of laminated lake sediments.

New Zealand is one of the world’s best laboratories for climate change and paleo-environmental research. Active tectonism associated with uplift, subduction and transcurrent movements along the Australian/Pacific plate boundary provide a wide range of late-Cenozoic tectonic landforms and deposits. The same uplift has provided a spine of mountains down the length of the country that intercepts the dominant westerly circulation, compartmentalizing climates and providing excellent targets in the forms of lakes and bogs for paleoenvironmental work. Quaternary volcanism on the North Island provides both tephras as stratigraphic markers and maar lakes for paleoclimate records. Extensive Quaternary glaciation in the South Island provides a critical Southern Hemisphere mid-latitude glacial record for global paleoclimate studies. The very late arrival of humans (less than a 1000 years ago) in New Zealand makes us a unique location to study natural environmental change.
Offshore, our extensive continental shelf provides numerous targets for core records and a number of major oceanic fronts occur within New Zealand waters. New Zealand also plays a very active role in Southern Ocean and Antarctic research and maintains a permanent base in McMurdo Sound in the Ross Sea region of Antarctica.
New Zealand is well placed to help understand global climate forcing due to its location in the Southern Hemisphere westerly zone. New Zealand climate responds to ENSO forcing and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. We are also critically located to look at interactions between Antarctica and the global climate system.