Stone balls

Like many island states of our Planet, New Zealand has a volcanic origin, which largely determines its mountainous nature. At the same time on its territory there are six active volcanoes, which repeatedly showed in their foreseeable past their rather aggressive nature. And as a confirmation of this on the sea beaches near the fishing village of Moeraki there are stone balls, as a consequence of the volcanic «bombardment» of this territory in prehistoric times.

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The stone balls of Moeraki and their little history

For the first time, stone balls located on the ocean coast, near the fishing village of Moerika, were described by the talented researcher of the region Walter Baldock Durrant Mantell, who in 1848 first documented these natural artifacts in the form of a number of drawings, subsequently published in one From the numbers of the popular science magazine National Geographic. However, this publication was not left without attention from other researchers of New Zealand, who began to conduct a more detailed study of this natural phenomenon.

And as a result of these studies, it was found that such stone balls are found not only in New Zealand, similar interesting places of America are found almost all over the globe, namely in the same in Costa Rica, Israel, USA, Canada, Russia and more. A number of places. At the same time, regardless of the fact that all these natural artifacts had significantly different chemical composition and sizes, but all of them had the same origin, namely, volcanic nature. So, in particular, when a volcano erupted, a certain amount of volcanic magma accumulated in its vent, which fell into a powerful stream of volcanic gases. At the same time, depending on the temperature of the molten magma, it was «sprayed» in the form of formless fragments, at a fairly high magma temperature or in the form of peculiar spherical formations, at its temperature close to the «hardening» temperature. It was the last «scenario» of the eruption of the volcano and the formation of stone balls Moeraki.

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Although this kind of volcanic theory of the origin of balls has its opponents who claim that these stone balls were formed from a salt-saturated prehistoric oceanic «brine», this does not affect how many people want to get to know this phenomenon of New Zealand nature. And, despite the difficult journey, to the stone balls, from year to year, the number of tourists does not decrease.

How to get there

In order to visit these reserved beaches, it’s enough to fly from the capital of New Zealand to Willington to the airport of Dunedin and then to the fishing village on a rather not bad highway it will be necessary to drive just 75 kilometers.