Get Ready Week

Peter Walker of the Hutt Emergency Management Centre is helping me work on our get ready plan for Muritai School. Get Ready week is in term 4 and Peter will come to watch us practise our tsunami drill.

Judging a Science Fair

Seatoun school asked me to be a judge for their Science Fair. The quality of the investigations was great and it was hard to choose the winner! I am really looking forward to the Muritai School Science Fair this week and know it will be just as fantastic!

GeoNet in action at GNS Science

The GeoNet programme improves the detection and understanding of geological hazards such as volcanos, earthquakes and landslides with live information collected by hazard monitoring equipment around the country. Information in various forms is freely available to everyone through its interactive website. For example, you can have emails sent to you each time there is an earthquake in NZ and you can email back a reply if you felt it. Scientists Kevin Fenaughty and Sara Page showed me around.

Cool Student resources from GNS Science Lower Hutt

Julian Thomson, a teacher and researcher at GNS Science, showed me amazing resources he creates as part of his Educational Outreach programme. He has a passion for glaciers and an interest in earthquakes, fossils and rocks among other things!
Check out the GNS website for Julians's blog.

Visiting Earthquake Scientists at GNS Science

Scientist Rob Langridge showed me an exciting research project he is working on!
Aerial photographs show scientists lots of information about fault lines but in New Zealand large areas of forest cover mean the contours of the land cannot be seen in many places.
He is using a laser scanner operated from a small plane to collect images that travel down to the land and bounce back up to the plane without showing the trees!

Visiting scientists at GNS Science Lower Hutt

At Harcourt Park in Upper Hutt we could see the fault line as a clear line running vertically down the river bank. Look on the left side of the photo where the gravels change colour and texture in a straight line from just under the big beech tree to the water.



Earthquake scientist Frank Van Dissen took me to see evidence of the Wellington fault line along the banks of the Hutt River. Here you can see the fault exposed on the north west bank.
Crushed rock from the fault is washed into the river.

GNS Science in Lower Hutt

This trench is across the earthquake faultline at Ohariu Valley near Johnsonville.
Photos courtesy of GNS Science

This week I have been talking to earthquake scientists at GNS Science.
Nicola Litchfield is an earthquake geologist who investigates large prehistoric earthquakes in the Wellington region. She is part of a team who have dug deep trenches across earthquake faults around Wellington. Through analysis of the exposed layers and carbon dating them the dates of previous quakes can be estimated.