Around 350,000 years ago, the centre of New Zealand's North Island looked nothing like the mountainous, scrub-covered landscape familiar today. Vast beech and podocarp forests covered the region during a cold glacial period, providing habitat for abundant native birdlife, right up until one of the most explosive volcanic events ever recorded on Earth tore through the landscape without warning. Known as the Whakamaru supereruption, the blast released enough material to bury much of the country, yet for decades scientists struggled to reconstruct exactly how such an enormous eruption actually unfolded. A team of researchers led by Anna Miller at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington has now pieced together the clearest picture yet of the event, using scattered volcanic deposits found across New Zealand and the wider South Pacific.
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