Sticky by Laurie Winkless

Author:Laurie Winkless
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472950819
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER SIX

These Shaky Isles

On 30 October 2018, I was at my desk in Wellington, New Zealand, happily writing about curling, when I felt a low rumble. For someone who hasn’t grown up around them, earthquakes feel completely alien, and yet every nerve in your body seems to recognise them as a threat. We’d experienced several brief tremors since moving from London a few years before, but this was the first time I had to follow the NZ government’s ‘drop cover hold’ advice, and clambered under my desk, phone in hand. The shaking lasted a few seconds, and did nothing more dramatic than knock some pens onto the floor. But I was still holding onto the table leg, heart racing, when my Kiwi husband phoned to check in on me a few minutes later.

This quake wasn’t a serious one but it served as a reminder of New Zealand’s precarious location. The country sits astride the boundary of two major tectonic plates, which are moving slowly and inexorably towards each other. The nature of that interaction depends very much on location. At the bottom of the South Island (Te Waipounamu), the Australian Plate dives, or subducts, below the Pacific Plate. Just off the east coast of the North Island (Te Ika-a-Māui), the situation is reversed – there, the Pacific Plate plunges below the Australian one. In between, there’s almost no subduction. Instead, beneath most of the South Island, the two plates grind along and into each other. It’s the complexity of these interactions that gives New Zealand its dramatic landscape. From the snow-tipped movie-star good looks of the Southern Alps, to the soft sandy beaches of the Coromandel Peninsula, this country can’t deny its geology.

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