Dr Oliver McLeod traversed Karioi’s slopes, met its people and listened to their stories to produce a remarkable map that plots the geology and whakapapa of Karioi side by side.

We've asked Oliver to come speak to us since his last visit in 2020 was incredibly popular. Now working for Waikato Regional Council, Oliver will take us for another look into what makes Karioi so special, from a geological point of view.

Oliver says we owe a lot of our landscape to local volcanoes erupting between 2.6 and 2.3 million years ago. Even Whāingaroa’s famous surf break at Whale Bay is linked to ancient lava flows that jut out from the coast and cause the waves to curl and break. 

To find out what’s happening deep below Karioi’s surface, Oliver spent many months in 2021/22 hiking up and around the mountain armed with a backpack, hammer and GPS, collecting hundreds of rock samples, some of which were sent to Japan for testing. Geologists there determined the samples’ ages by argon dating to work out the age of Karioi’s oldest and youngest lava flows. This is the first time anyone has sampled the area in this way.

Read more about his work here.

Placed limited to Karioi Project volunteers and Backyard Hub trappers.

RSVP with Jasmine - jasmine.edgar@arocha.org