I wrote this Review for the July 2025 edition of “StoneSpeak”, the Newsletter of the Southland Geological and Lapidary Club. The following is a slightly fuller version. My first Review in this Series was of Peter Ballance’s e-book (2017) “New Zealand Geology: An Illustrated Guide”. The Southland Club’s website is here and its Facebook Page is here.
“GeoTrips” www.geotrips.org.nz
“GeoTrips” is a GNS Science website containing a number of relatively brief fieldtrip guides to places in New Zealand. Its “About” page states: “These GeoTrips are rock outcrops, geological displays or landforms that you can visit and explore in New Zealand. They have been compiled by GNS Science with the kind assistance of geologists and knowledgeable enthusiasts from around the country… We encourage you to go and visit these locations to discover for yourself the amazing story of New Zealand’s geology and natural processes.” Up until recently, GNS Science was the Crown Research Institute for Geological and Nuclear Science. On 1 July this year, GNS Science merged with NIWA, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, to become Earth Sciences NZ, its new website being www.earthsciences.nz.
The main person behind GeoTrips, Julian Thomson of “Out There Learning” (see photo above, right), is maybe New Zealand’s leading geology educator and communicator. In 2019 he was awarded the Science Communicators Association of New Zealand prize for leading the creation of the GeoTrips website. He writes: “GeoTrips has several hundred locations around the country that are publicly accessible and robust enough to cope with foot traffic. They are rated for quality, include a health and safety comment and show images and give background information on the geology of the area.”
The GeoTrips website has a map on which all the trips are located. There are 12 in Southland. For example, “Howells Point Volcanics” takes you to the Back Beach of Riverton Aparima.
The “Howells Point Volcanics” GeoTrip was compiled by Jasmine Mawson who had completed a Masters thesis in Geology at the University of Otago in 2018, on the topic of submarine volcanism along the coast between Riverton and Colac Bay Oraka. Her GeoTrip looks specifically at hydrothermally altered pillow lavas, volcaniclastics and dikes. Each Geotrip has three sections (see photos above). “What’s Here?” is a summary – for Howell’s Point Volcanics, it’s “An undersea pillow lava pile, along with violently erupted volcanic breccia, cross cut by dikes and all hydrothermally metamorphosed”. Section two is “Learn About It”, often a paragraph or two providing details of the geology or landform. Section three is “Have A Look!”, containing one or more photos with further explanation. There are usually more photos at the top of the GeoTrip’s page, seven of them in the case of Howell’s Point Volcanics. Make sure you look throgh the top photos each time you visit a GeoTrip.
The GeoTrip for Southland’s Gemstone Beach was written by Nick Mortimer, a well-known GNS Science geologist. In the “What’s Here?” section, he notes that the ones on Gemstone Beach’s are not eroded out of the cliffs there but have travelled down the Waiau River from Fiordland and have been transported east along Te Waewae Bay. In “Learn About It”, he describes the hydrogrossular garnets that can be found on the beach: “The hydrogrossulars have come from somewhere else. That somewhere is the Countess Range where the garnets form in rocks called rodingites in the Dun Mountain Ophiolite Belt. They have been tumbled and polished in a 150 km journey down the Eglinton and Waiau valleys.” Other Southland GeoTrips include Riverton Aparima’s Te Hikoi Museum, McCracken’s Rest (just west of Gemstone Beach), the Clifden Caves, Mount Titiroa (south of Manapouri), Bluff’s Stirling Point, Waipapa Point in the Catlins, and the petrified wood forest at Curio Bay.
Among the GeoTrips I am familiar with are three for Ward Beach in Marlborough (see photos above). I visit this beach two or three times each year and have found these GeoTrips especially interesting and informative. One of them highlights the uplifted rocks and abandoned Flaxbourne River estuary that resulted from the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake. The second examines the Ward Beach boulders while the third is on the Chancet Rocks Reserve, featuring the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary (formerly known as the K-T boundary) – “This layer has been recognised worldwide and marks the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs, caused by a devastating asteroid impact that struck part of where Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula is today.” I often wish more information, and more photographs, were included in a GeoTrip. However, they are a valuable resource for drawing attention to some very interesting geological places, and some have led me to conduct my own follow-up research to find out more.
GeoTrips is one of many resources listed on the excellent “Geoscience Education & Outreach Resource Database”, compiled by the Geoscience Society of New Zealand. This online database contains over 150 publicly accessible Geoscience Resources from New Zealand and the world. Some are similar to GeoTrips, such as the USA-based Geology Virtual Trips. Others are more ambitious, allowing the viewer to explore a virtual landscape online, such as Stanford University’s “Virtual Field Trips”, which includes a set looking at coastal geology and volcanology around Auckland and the North Island. Lying somewhere in-between is “Geo Virtual Field Trips – Greece”, which provides photos and text in more detail than GeoTrips.
The next Review in this Series is of Mindat.org. An Index to the Series is here.
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