Media Releases and News

A marine geologist from the Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences Limited is to join scientists from 11 countries for a two-month deep-sea drilling project off New Zealand's east coast.

Two scientists from the Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences Limited are taking part in a major international study of the tsunami that killed more than a thousand people in Papua New Guinea in July.

Scientists are going to explore the bottom of Lake Taupo in a submersible to find out more about Taupo's violent volcanic history and a geothermal system under the lakebed.

Ten years of research and bore fruit this week with the release of a major publication on the geology and prospectivity of the East Coast region -- New Zealand's newest commercial petroleum area.

May 24 is the 30th anniversary of the magnitude 7 Inangahua earthquake. It remains New Zealand's biggest on-land quake in the last three decades. Many West Coasters remember the quake as the worst experience of their lives. JOHN CALLAN of the Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences Limited reports.

Eyewitness accounts of an orange glow in the sky above the epicentre during the main shockwave of the 1968 Inangahua earthquake were dismissed as fanciful at the time. The phenomenon, known as ''earthquake lights'', has been reported for centuries and remains one of the great mysteries of earth science.

Ground-shaking recordings taken on the West Coast during the 1968 magnitude 7 Inangahua earthquake were so strong that some scientists refused to believe them.

In dollar terms, the 1968 Inangahua earthquake was New Zealand's fourth most damaging earthquake this century. In 1998 values it cost $39 million in damage to buildings and their contents. Excluded from this figure is damage to roads, bridges and other uninsured property.

Six potential oil and gas-bearing geological structures, each as big as the large Maui natural gas field in Taranaki, have been discovered off New Zealand's East Coast, geologists say.

New Zealand scientists are leading an international team in a study of New Zealand rocks and fossils to try and find out what killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.