NZ Geography: Shake, rattle and roll
Shake rattle and roll
This geology unit uses of five of the Meet the Locals videos on your DVD. They're also on the DOC and TVNZ websites and you'll find web links in the unit.
We focus on a slice of New Zealand's volcanic activity, exploring specific volcanoes, the consequences from their eruptions and the effect on local biodiversity.
Videos include:
- Waimangu Geothermal Area
- Earth Science Lab - White Island
- Visiting a Live Volcano- White island
- Rangitoto
- History Never Repeats. Curio Bay Southland and the fossilised forest.
- Lahar
You'll also find links to supporting Meet the Locals videos, websites and learning tools which provide practical activities to develop your students' knowledge and skills. Background information is also provided within the learning activities and answers where necessary.
Years: 7, 8 and 9
Levels: 3 and 4
Science Achievement objectives
Planet Earth and Beyond
Earth Systems
Students will:
Develop an understanding that water, air, rocks and soil and life
forms make up our planet and recognise that these are also Earth's
resources.
Living world
Students will:
(Ecology)
Explain how living things are suited to their particular habitat
and how they respond to environmental changes both natural and
human induced.
Learning outcomes
The students will:
1. Explore the Volcanic Plateau on a map and speculate as
to why it's New Zealand's main area of volcanic activity and is so
unpredictable.
2. Examine the eruption on Mt Tarawera and alter a diagram to
show the sequence of volcanic events that led to disaster.
3. Find and discuss evidence from the video that shows just
how violent the Tarawera eruption was.
4. Use a map of the Tarawera area to identify changes in the
land since the eruption.
5. Research a special feature of the Waimangu Volcanic Valley
and then design a "See how the world began" page, for the tourism
website.
6. Use a video to find out how scientists monitor a volcano
and visit a website to find out if plans are in place if a volcano
erupts on the mainland.
7. List, rate and assess White Island's volcanic
hazards.
8. Create an animated powerpoint that illustrates the very
special plant succession on Rangitoto Island.
9. Show with simple working model, an understanding of lahars
and how the fossilised forest was created at Curio Bay
10. Design a pamphlet for the Curio Bay Heritage Centre that
shows that the five principles of ecotourism are being
followed.
Teaching and learning activities
1. Starters
Use these starters to check student's ideas about
volcanoes and how they form.
Look at these
New Zealand volcanoes and decide
whether they are all "still volcanoes".
(Students sometimes think they have to be currently erupting to be
volcanoes)
Look at the
Lake Taupo photos and decide if
this lake is a volcano.
(Lake Taupo is a caldera volcano. The magma chamber emptied rapidly
during this eruption and the sides of the volcano collapsed back
into it forming a big crater basin. It filled with water to become
a lake.)
2. You can check your students' ideas on how volcanoes happen with these two starters.
To find out more about the earth's interior and volcanic plates
check out
Volcanoes
Online
3. Waimangu Geothermal Area
Explore the
Volcanic Plateau with this
map.
Speculate as to why it's New Zealand's main area of volcanic
activity and so unpredictable. Reasons include:
- The Pacific tectonic plate is sinking beneath the Australian Plate.
- At a certain depth its rocks heat and produce volcanic activity. This erupts at the surface through minor steam vents, mud pools and hot springs.
- The region has erupted in major ways too with volcanic eruptions, collapsing mountains and the formation of lakes.
- This region of eruption stretches from Whakaari (White Island) in the Bay of Plenty to Mt Ruapehu and is the 'line of fire' and part of the huge 'ring of fire' around the Pacific Ocean.
4. Tourists are drawn to Rotorua's thermal activity today but this area was once home to one of the wonders of the world. People came from far and wide to soak in the thermal hot pools and view the delicately tinted silica of the Pink and White Terraces.
Show the photos and speculate as to why they are no longer there today.
Investigate the eruption on Mt Tarawera by doing this activity in pairs. Share the diagrams when complete.
Reinforce how Mt Tarawera was a wet or explosive eruption. The water mixed with magma and turned it into an explosive fluid. The same thing happens when water is poured over incredibly hot oil - like the oil used to deep fry chips.
Check out this oil burning Flicka photo sequence - It's a good chance to touch on fire safety when cooking chips! If water is run into a pot of burning chip oil it will explode up the wall of your kitchen.
(These fires are best extinguished with a dry powder
extinguisher, or by throwing a damp cloth over the pot.)
5. Watch the video
Waimangu Geothermal Area It's the
newest wholly formed geothermal site in the world.
As they view, have the students look and listen for evidence that
shows just how violent this eruption was. Discuss this after you
view the video.
Ideas may include:
- The eruption split the mountain in two and expanded Lake Rotomahana 20 times;
- It stripped all vegetation around Lake Rotomahana and Tarawera;
- Seven craters were formed and thick mud and ash covered hundreds of square kilometres of land. Large cracks crossed the region.
Discuss how volcanoes change the land and ask again what they think happened to The Pink and White Terraces.
(The Terraces turned to dust and fragments and the site of the terraces became a crater over 100 metres deep. Steam erupted for several months but it filled with water within 15 years. This new Lake Rotomahana, was much larger than the old one.)
Use this map of the area to find these changes in the land.
- The seven craters;
- The comparison between the old lake and the new;
- The villages affected;
- The area covered by mud;
- The areas most affected by falling scoria;
- The Waimangu Geothermal Area with the Waimangu Geyser and New
Zealand's largest hot spring - Frying Pan Lake. (Look for the chain
of craters)
6. Tourists have always come to the Tarawera area. They were back there one day after the eruption! Ask the students why this tourism operation uses the slogan - "How the world began".
Watch the video again and have students watch for and list "beginning of the world" examples like:
- Unusual geothermal adapted plants such as extreme thermophiles;
- Inferno crater - the crypto geyser- "a geyser caught in the bottom of a bowl";
- Waimangu Geyser;
- A native forest that's only a 100 years old;
- Frying Pan Lake;
- Silica terraces.
Students can then choose and investigate one of these features and bullet point their findings.
They can design a "See how the world began" page, for the tourism website Waimangu Volcanic Valley . Their web page should include an image and the bullet pointed information.
7. White Island
The next two videos examine White Island, an active volcano.
Students can build their knowledge with
White Island - What do you know? Discuss the two
questions in pairs and share the ideas in class.
Find out how scientists monitor a live volcano with the first of
the White Island videos-
Earth Science Lab video
Focus on the science of volcanology for the first viewing and what
Brad Scott tests and looks for on his visits to the island.
Mentioned in the video are:
- Crater lake chemistry - he tests the springs and streams;
- The scientists use a seismograph and also a barometer for measuring the airways;
- They take deformation surveys which measure the shape and changes of the ground - to see if it is expanding or contracting;
- Soil gas surveys and airborne gas surveys are also carried out.
Discuss how the findings can be applied to other volcanoes and see if the students can give other examples, similar to the one described in the video.
As a class decide whether testing is carried out on any of our volcanoes that are not presently active or dormant and whether any emergency preparations are in place, just in case an eruption does happen.
(Students often think a volcano is extinct if the activity has been in the distant past. Scientists consider a volcano active if it has erupted in the last 100,000 years.)
Together, look at this
Volcanic Eruption website from the Taranaki
Regional Council
Explore the site to see that emergency plans are well in place as
is a monitoring system including eight seismographs and a web
camera.
This
geonet website is well worth
exploring as students will see just how much "shake rattle and
rolling" is occurring all the time.
Get the students to "google" their own region's civil defence site
to see if volcanic activity gets a mention. Their regional council
looks after civil defence.
8. Show the video again but this time students should look for the hazards - a question they have already discussed. List them together and then try Rate White Island's Volcanic Hazards.
Complete this section by watching
Visiting a live volcano . You'll
see more of the hazards on White Island and how destructive they've
actually been. You'll also see what visitors wear to minimise the
risk.
Students may wish to reassess their ratings on
Rate White Island's Volcanic Hazards.
9. Rangitoto island
At 600 years old Rangitoto Island is Auckland's newest volcano and
the largest of about 50 volcanoes in the Auckland field.
Rangitoto is a shield volcano so streams of lava spewed from cracks
in the earth and the island emerged from the sea in a series of
fiery volcanic explosions. Lava cooled and hardened into a
cone before more eruptions sent a number of hot lava flows down the
sides of the volcano, forming the sloping sides of black basaltic
rock which make up 95 per cent of an island that's almost
circular.
Our video focuses on the plants that have grown up on the
inhospitable environment of lava rock and on Rangitoto you can see
the different stages plant succession from bare lava, to individual
trees getting established and the forest.
This is called primary succession. The plants are colonising
bare ground that has never developed a soil and on Rangitoto Island
this succession is quite unusual because it's gone from bare lava,
to forest, without the stages in between. Pohutukawa was one of the
first plants to take hold on the fresh lava and after 600 years, a
pohutukawa forest, the largest in New Zealand, covers about 80% of
the island.
First, try the activity
Plant succession around Mt Tarawera to build an
understanding of how succession, where one group of plants has
gradually replaced another, works.
10. Look at how plants reproduce, with a plant hunt in the school grounds or nearby patch of bush. Find examples of each of the three main reproductive types - spore, cone and flower bearers. Remember though, they're not always easy to see and may be visible only at certain times of the year.
(New Zealands Ministry of Education Resource - Book 7, The Bush - Classifying Forest Plants, pages 6 to 7 has some handy teacher notes.)
Encourage the students to write questions about how these three types reproduce and then provide resource material that allows them to find out.
Finish with the question. If an island is formed by a volcano and erupts from the sea, how did the plants get there? Think, pair and then share the ideas in class.
11. Now watch the Rangitoto Video The students should look for:
- The answer to - How did the plants get there?
- And for differences between the plant succession at Mt Tarawera compared to that on Rangitoto Island.
Discuss these two points in class when you've seen the
video.
12. Introduce epiphytes. These plants are perchers. They simply
perch high on the branches and trunks of host trees where there is
more light to grow and they don't harm the tree.
Epiphytes normally perch and grow where leaf litter has gathered, like in the fork of a tree or in the moss. They don't feed off the tree so they're not parasites.
The video mentions:
- astelia
- Kirk's daisy tree
- puka
- some native orchids.
They're all epiphytes but they've adapted to the rocky crevices of Rangitoto and begin life in these instead of high in a tree.
Watch the video again looking for how the leaf litter is formed to support these epiphytes.
Watch closely to find out how the pohutakawa seed arrived in the
first place.
(It's extremely fine and would have blown there.)
After the video use this
Project Crimson Resource together
to identify the special features pohutakawa have, that let them
grow so well on Rangitoto.
13. In pairs or small groups make a simple animated powerpoint that
shows plant succession on Rangitoto island. It should show:
- How the lichen arrived
- How the pohutakawa got there
- Why pohutakawa could establish itself on the rocky landscape.
- How pohutakawa helped other plants grow.
You could use this animated
powerpoint, as a model .
14. History Never Repeats - Curio Bay, The
Catlins
We head to a remnant from the Gondwana land mass in the last of the geology videos. We see the fossilised remains of a 180 million year old forest near the most southern part of New Zealand. This forest is one of the biggest and least disturbed Jurassic fossil forests in the world.
It's in the timeframe of Jurassic Park, 199 Million to 145 Million years ago.
As a class, check out the summary on National Geographic's Jurassic page
Enlarge the map first to see Gwandana and work out which part
would break away to become New Zealand.
(At this time, most of the future New Zealand was beneath the
sea.)
India was the first to break away, followed by Africa and then about 100 million years ago New Zealand, slowly drifted north.
Decide as a class which of the things from National Geographic's Jurassic Age summary, match things we find in New Zealand today.
Examples:
- Ferns and conifers - for example giant pines are the relatives of today's kauri;
- Insects - weta saw dinosaurs come and go;
- Reptiles- the relatives of the tuatara roamed Gondwana about this time.
Think pair and share. Why didn't rodents hop aboard when NZ drifted off? They didn't appear in New Zealand until people brought them here.
(Fossils tell us rodent-like mammals appeared shortly after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. That was about 65 million years ago so the rodents were not around by the time NZ broke away from Gondwana. Our birds evolved without them.)
15. Watch the Meet the Locals video
History Never Repeats
When this forest was alive and well Curio Bay was a broad coastal
floodplain flanked by active volcanoes. Mudflows or lahars from
these volcanoes swept over the forest burying trees and the
understory of ferns.
Mudslides at Curio Bay examines the nature of
lahars and students can create a lahar model of their own and find
out about one lahar that caused one of New Zealand's worst
disasters.
Now, watch this
lahar video to see the Ruapehu
one in action.
16. The community at Curio Bay wants to create a Natural Heritage
Centre that they believe will enhance the visitors' experience and
better protect the petrified forest and the unique wildlife that
lives there.
They want to use the area as resource, just as the Waimangu Geothermal Area has for the people that live there. Their website welcomes people to Curio Bay/Tumu Toka pointing out that it is home to:
- A 170 million year old Fossil Forest from the Jurassic age;
- A nesting site for New Zealand's unique Yellow Eyed Penguin/Hoiho;
- A beautiful sweeping beach at the the adjoining Porpoise Bay, where a resident pod of rare Hector Dolphins jump and play in the surf;
- Seals and sealions enjoying a well deserved rest;
- A campsite nestled subtly into the flaxes;
- Spectacular wild waves crashing onto the cliffs.
In the last of the volcanic activities the students can design the pamphlet for people who may wish to visit the Heritage Centre.
Its explanation of facilities and tourist activities must show that the five principles of ecotourism are being followed.
1. There are only positive impacts to the environment.
2. Any involvement by visitors will increase their
awareness and understanding of
the natural wonders of Curio Bay.
3. Conservation will benefit because the area is better managed.
4. The local people have made the decisions about the kind of
activities and amount of
tourism that should happen.
5. Local people have benefited by finding out more about the wonders of their own area and making use of opportunities that come their way.
Get the students to assess each others pamphlets and check to
see if the five principles of ecotourism are actually
demonstrated.
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