New Zealand’s First Global Geopark Preserves a Host of Unique Features

Eelephant rocks, the limestone remains of a 30-million-year-old seabed, take on a variety of shapes and forms. And yes, visitors are allowed to climb on them. If every rock has a tale to tell, those of the Waitaki District on New Zealand’s South Island would fill a library. This is a land of limestone, sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone — basic sedimentary rock. Yet from this simple matter, time, wind, and rain have composed a wondrous story.

For UNESCO, a global geopark is a single, unified geographical region, with what they deem to be “landscapes of international geological significance.” They are created to foster education, protect natural features, and promote sustainable development of the land. Containing 42 geological, cultural, and paleontological sites within its boundaries, the new geopark now joins the likes of such places as Spain’s El Hierro, Germany’s Swabian Alb, and the United Kingdom’s North West Highlands.

“We had a big supporting team working on this and are absolutely thrilled to be a global geopark,” says Helen Jansen, chair of the trust. “What began as a mostly volunteer operation is now allowing us to put a magnifying glass for the entire world on an important part of New Zealand’s whenua,” she adds, using the Māori word for “land.”

The educational hub of the geopark is the Vanished World Centre in Duntroon, where visitors can view and learn more about some of the Waitaki’s larger fossil finds. This includes shark-toothed dolphins, the remnants of massive whales, and evidence of other marine creatures who lived during the Oligocene epoch, as much as 30 million years ago. A “Discovery Room” contains trays of Waitaki rock and soil, suffused with minute fossils throughout.

Of course, travelers to the geopark can also see fossils out on the Vanished World trail itself. Anatini is a gorge littered with limestone boulders. There, displayed beneath Plexiglas, are the fossilized jawbone, shoulder blade, and vertebrae of a baleen whale from 25 million years ago. Visitors can also take a scramble on the so-called Earthquakes, giant limestone slabs sheared apart in a block slide, now lying in a jumble on the canyon floor.

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