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New Zealand is a country with a sense of humor. Despite the indignity of frequently being left off of world maps, they are making hilarious tourism videos. They focus on the fact that other countries are just jealous! If your world map is missing New Zealand, to the southeast of Australia, report it to the authorities!
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Surfers in California, get ready. In about a week, energy from a massive storm in the Southern Hemisphere will travel across the ocean. A buoy near Campbell Island, south of New Zealand, recorded the largest known wave in the Southern Hemisphere: over 78 feet high! The buoy doesn’t record every wave, meaning others could have been even bigger!
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A giant sinkhole has opened up in New Zealand! In an area known as Earthquake Flat, the hole appeared overnight. The 66 foot deep opening in the earth, is fascinating to geologists and volcanologists. The bottom is 60,000 year-old volcanic deposits, with millennia of sediment and ash layers rising up, and it’s all clearly exposed!
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Some lucky visitors to New Zealand’s Auckland Zoo witnessed a greater flamingo chick hatching! The flamingo is already exploring on its own, with parents Cheviot and Neil nearby. Young flamingos have grey feathers. Carotenoid pigments in the foods they eat will give them pink feathers when they’re a few years old.
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A curious passenger flying home to New Zealand noticed a mass floating in the ocean and sent photos to scientists. They identified it as a huge raft of pumice spewed out of the Havre Seamount. When volcanoes erupt underwater, they often go unnoticed. This massive eruption happened in 2012 and everyone missed it!
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Often insect names represent the location where they were discovered, but Turkish scientist Erol Yıldırım has named a new insect Tiphia Bahattini after his father. There have been insects named after Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln. Recently a wasp in New Zealand was named after the Harry Potter character Lucius Malfoy!
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Alan Tennyson found prehistoric giant penguin fossils encased in a boulder on a New Zealand beach. The penguin stood five and a half feet tall and lived in the late Paleocene epoch 60-56 million years ago. The new species, named Waimanu Biceae, is not the largest ever found, but it is the oldest!
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