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Updated: May 4, 2025
It was to their action that we owed the famous white and pink terraces and the warm lake of Rotomahana which were ruined by the destructive eruption of Mount Tarawera, already described. The United States is abundantly supplied with hot springs, but geysers, outside of the Yellowstone region, are found only in California and Nevada.
Our Alps might make Switzerland envious; one or two of our rivers are more beautiful than the Rhine; the plains of Canterbury are finer than midland England; the rolling ranges and lakes of Otago may bear comparison with Scotland and with Wales; Mount Egmont or Tongariro would make Vesuvius blush; the hot-spring region of Rotomahana and Rotorua contains wonders that cannot be matched between Iceland and Baku; and here in the North our forest country is grander than the Tyrol, and more voluptuously lovely than the wooded shores of the Mediterranean.
The crust of the earth had cooled sufficiently to permit water to lie on its surface, probably in hot shallow seas, like the late Lake Rotomahana.
But the action was hydrothermal, just such as was seen in course of operation in New Zealand a few years ago when, in the Rotomahana district, one could actually see the growing of the marvellous White and Pink Terraces formed by the release of silica from the boiling water exuding from the hot springs, which water, so soon as the heat and pressure were removed, began to deposit its silica very rapidly; while at the Thames Gold-field, in the same country hot, silicated water continuously boiled out of the walls of some of the lodes after the quartz had been removed and re-deposited a siliceous sinter thereon.
To travelers and strangers the greatest resultant loss will be the destruction of those world-famous curiosities, the white and pink terraces, in the vicinity of Lake Rotomahana and the region of the famous geysers. The natives have a superstition that the eruption of the extinct Tarawera was caused by the profanation of foreign footsteps.
At a place called Rotomahana, in the vicinity of Mount Tarawera, there was formerly a lake of about one hundred and twenty acres in area, which was in its way one of the most remarkable bodies of water upon the earth. Formerly, we say, for this lake no longer exists, it having been destroyed by the very forces to which it owed its fame.
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