Editorial: Signs of life

Editorial: Signs of life


Every now and then one of our mountains clears its throat and asserts its vibrancy.

This serves to remind us that it's not some inert natural skyscraper.

That powerful forces are at work deep within its innards.

Perhaps, even, that a bit of respect wouldn't go amiss, thank you very much.

This time it's Tongariro proclaiming its potency, as if to make the point that we need not look as far afield as Mars for signs of life.

And when the official threat status passed, at least for the time being, there might even have been a faint sense of disappointment from parts of the country that rightly or wrongly didn't particularly feel they were facing the prospect of disruption, let alone danger.

Perhaps it's a failure of empathy, but as far as volcanoes are concerned, we are still liable to regard eruptions not only in terms of threat, but theatre.

Certainly from this distance they do put on a show and in this case a good deal of the action happened at night. Inconvenient for spectators.

It was almost inevitable, given that so many of us are simultaneously in Olympic mode, that an element of almost competitive judgment is getting applied to some of the actual facts about Tongariro's mighty expulsion of effort.

When the judges reported back, it turned out the eruption was fairly small scale.

It shot almost 7000 metres into the air, which apparently put it into the "not insignificant" category.

Rock was ejected over a kilometre radius.

It turns out the eruption was some steam-driven venting rather than the mighty gushings of new molten lava.

Noteworthy, to be sure, but not sufficient to progress into the volcanic semi-finals, so to speak.

We ought to be pleased. Safety first, after all.

And yet when vulcanologists assert that heightened activity may continue, and that this may even be the start of a prolonged period of activity in the area, there's a fair section of the further-flung community who are closer to hopeful than frowningly concerned.

This, we are told, is a really good example of why New Zealanders need to be prepared for volcanic eruptions, and to think about how to be prepared for ash fall and other hazards.

Fair point. For a while there, Civil Defence had a Volcanic Activity Potential Threat to New Zealand alert going.

It certainly isn't a good idea to get blase about such things.

In late November 2004, we reported, lightly and in fun, a "teenie weenie tsunami" hitting our shores.

It had the dynamics of a tsunami but not the scale we tended to associate with them.

Had we thought of it at the time, we would have classified the 30-centimetre wave as a "not not-insignificant" event.
Barely a month later, there was no smirking at all as we found ourselves covering the extravagant consequences of the Indian Ocean Boxing Day tsunami.

A bit of respect, it turns out, is not too much to ask.