Lois Cairns writes for the Sunday Star Times about a submarine to be launched this week in an attempt to find out what happened to Lake Rotomahana’s Pink and White Terraces.
The Terraces, acclaimed as the 8th natural wonder of the world, disappeared after the 1886 Tarawera eruption.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“Shaped liked a 2m torpedo, the Remus 100 – an autonomous underwater vehicle packed with instruments so it can take precise measurements – is being brought to New Zealand to help scientists looking for signs of geothermal activity at the bottom of the lake.
They hope it will enable them to map the lakebed and discover what happened to the Pink and White Terraces hydrothermal system after the 1886 Tarawera eruption.
…
“Most of us believe their demise came from the eruption and there is a lot of evidence to show that there is probably a very big crater down there . . . but nobody has seen this landscape for 150 years,” de Ronde said.”
An accompanying story can be found on the Radio New Zealand website, here.