Diary ‘finds’ Pink and White Terraces
RESEARCHERS believe they have found the burial site of the famous Pink and White Terraces, and are calling for a full archaeological investigation.
Using reverse engineering and surveying works of 19th century geologist Dr Ferdinand von Hochstetter, researchers Rex Bunn and Dr Sascha Nolden have deduced the Pink and White Terraces may have survived the Mt Tarawera eruption, 131 years after the eruption which engulfed them.
Their paper, published this week in the Journal of New Zealand Studies, plotted the three terrace locations beneath land, and not under Lake Rotomahana ‘‘as imagined by 19th century colonists and accepted by some by some later researchers’’.
The coordinates for the spring platforms, Te Otukapuarangi, Te Tuhi’s Spring and Te Tarata appear to be 10m to 15m underground, around the shores of the lake.
Nolden, a research librarian, rediscovered Hochstetter’s field survey notebooks while curating the Hochstetter Collection Basel in 2010: sharing them with Bunn six years later.
The diary plotted, in detail, the bearings of Lake Rotomahana and the Pink and White Terraces as they stood in 1859.
Bunn and Nolden worked backwards, plotting where Hochstetter would have stood to make those bearings, before establishing a survey baseline to give orientation and scale for Hochstetter’s map.
It took eight weeks to harvest the data required to reverse engineer the compass survey data.
Their predictions come six years after scientists believed they had discovered part of the Pink Terraces on the bottom of Lake Rotomahana.
But the 2011 announcement by Dr Cornel de Ronde from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) that scientists from the University of Waikato had found the Pink Terrace deep in the lake were disputed in 2016 by GNS Science.