Nothing beats a field trip to the beach! except when its raining……Obviously no one consulted the weather Gods when they planned this field trips ages ago. The farmers have been worried about a drought because it did not rain for about a month. Then the ONE day we want to go out and look at the rock formations and volcanic evidence, it rains, its foggy and we can’t see more than 5 feet in front of us over the bay. So much for Lyttelton Harbour. We still got to check out some pretty awesome things though. I don’t think I’ve ever looked a rocks so hard before in my life, and even more oddly, found them interesting.
oooohhh aaaaahhhh rocks.
We practiced our sketching skills on the red cliffs….I guess that explains how Redcliffs(a suburb) got its name. I felt it was against my religion to wear shoes at the beach despite the lack of beach day weather so I promptly took my shoes off, dug my feet in the sand and drew a masterpiece. Don’t forget its very important to include scale in your drawings!
Shag rock
You’ll notice in the background wedged between BJ and Annemarie, the infamous Shag rock. It is a symbol of Sumner Beach whose name originates from the Shag birds that air out their wings on its ledges. I can not tell you how many times I have explored and climbed on this rock and never quite wondered how it got there. The scientist in me is very embarrassed I assure you. Well, it turns out that the cliffs used to reach miles and miles further out and tapered off in to the water. They were erroded by wind and sea at different rates. My classmate Mickey, a geologist informed me that Shag rock would have gotten left behind because the erosion would have taken place at different rates and perhaps Shag rock was made out of a denser type of rock which would have made the erosion harder. You learn something new everyday.
who knew rocks could be so interesting?
Here we are gazing at rock formations on the Summit Road. Please, note the hazy valley below. For peace of mind, might I add we had the van following behind us with flasher lights on and car spotters ahead. Still, we maybe saw a whopping 5 cars in the 45 minutes we wandered down the middle of the road.
In between studying rocks, I felt the need to save the snails who were never going to make it across the road in time.
My new friend
Onion Rocks!
These rocks looked they were onions with the layers of skin (more rock) around them, therefore geologists named them onion rocks. I shouldn’t poke fun at lame names, astrophysicists are even worse when it comes to naming things.
famous rock
This dike rock formations is apparently pretty well know
throughout New Zealand, or at least at Canterbury University. Iyla, another of our geologists got really excited to see it so it must be cool. What happened here is a lava flow was created along a horizontal path. Then later on, the lava from another eruption flowed up vertically trying to push its way to the surface. Pretty neat huh? Can you spot the two different lava flows. We had some AWESOME interpretive dances of the lava flows erupting from volcanoes.
