Naming seamounts and nunataks
People may remember that the NZ Geographic Board put the ‘‘h’’ in Whanganui and removed the N-word from three features in Canterbury.
The board also has a fascination with naming features in Antarctica and beneath the nation’s oceans.
In May, for example, it gazetted 262 names for geographic features in Antarctica, mostly in the Ross Dependency.
Now we know that the 2334m peak located about 490 kilometres southeast of Scott Base is named Lyttelton, not after the port but after a former Governor-General, Sir Charles John Lyttelton, the 10th Viscount Cobham, who held the position from 1957-1962.
And we know that Boomerang Range refers to a narrow mountain range that curves like a boomerang and is about 190km west of Scott Base.
The Geographic Board – which has its own version of The Gazette called The Gazetteer – also named spurs, icefalls, bluffs and nunataks.
A nunatak is an isolated peak of rock that projects above inland ice or snow. It’s an Inuit word.
The Geographic Board was also busy gazetting undersea features in May.
So the undersea banks about 550km south of Invercargill are known as the Cathedral Banks due to their spire-like appearance.
The board named and unnamed scarps, knolls, fracture zones and seamounts.
A seamount is an undersea mountain that does not reach the sea surface and is often volcanic.
The Rose-Marie Thompson Seamount, about 420km northeast of Auckland, is named for the DSIR staffer who wrote New Zealand’s first undersea feature gazetteer.
It’s hard to name an undersea or Antarctic feature after a person – and nobody can name something after themselves.
The application must show a connection between the place and the person and that their association is significant.
The Geographic Board’s function seems reminiscent of the famous Arthur C Clarke short story called The Nine Billion Names of God.
In that story, Tibetan monks seek to list all of the names of God, after which the universe will end.
Slow down, Geographic Board.