How big is new Zealand North Island
What is the size of New Zealand's North Island?Located about 15 kilometers southeast of the town of Rotorua in a land known as Earthquake Flat, the hole in the ground can measure up to two soccer pitches and plunge to a level that would devour a six-story structure. "```The biggest I've seen before would be about a third of the magnitude of this, so this is really great,` volcanoologist Brad Scott from the Kiwi Earth Science company GNS Science explained to AP.
Last fortnight before sunrise, a farmer's attendant came across the dirt hole for the first time and avoids driving his motorcycle in when he gathers animals for the first milk. "Only when I came down in the light of day did I see how big it was," said Colin Tremain, ranch man.
"We' re holding it the way it is to keep the stocks out, even though they're not dumb, they won't run into a pit, they can see the danger." Scott says the burrow could have formed for up to 100 years after decade-long rains gradually eroded some of the lime stone bedrock on the property.
Not only is the 20 meter deep dizzying.
"I see in this pit the initial 60,000-year-old Vulcan reservoir that came out of this crater," Scott said to TVNZ. Top three meters are vulcanic ash." One of the things that makes this gap so much larger than those that preceeded it in New Zealand is the record-breaking rainfalls that contributed to it - almost 170 mm of precipitation in 38h.