Lost world wonder rediscovered in NZ

A team of scientists has stumbled across a geological feature which was once New Zealand's premier tourist attraction, thought to have been destroyed by a volcanic eruption 125 years ago.

The two pink and white terraces once rose from a lake like a wedding cake, each scallop-shaped basin holding a pool of steaming thermal water.

They were dubbed the eighth wonder of the world, so magnificent that tourists traversed the globe by boat to glimpse their beauty and soak in the magical mineral water they contained.

But in 1886, these majestic forms were lost in a violent volcanic eruption that buried six villages, killed more than 150 people and changed the face of the country's fledgling tourism industry.

The terraces, south of Rotorua in New Zealand's geothermal region, were thought to be have been destroyed until a scientific team revealed this month that both were in fact at least partially intact 60 metres underwater.

Using the same underwater robots deployed to search the world's most famous shipwreck, the Titanic, a team of researchers from New Zealand's GNS Science and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the United States mapped the floor of Lake Rotomahana.

They were interested in geothermal activity under the lake, which reformed 20 times its original size after the eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886.

Stumbling across the terraces took the team by surprise, said project leader Cornel de Ronde of GNS Science, who described what the sonar equipment found.

"The two places on the lake floor where we encountered hard, up-standing crescent-shaped features correspond to the locations of the pink and white terraces before the Tarawera eruption," de Ronde said.

"The rounded terrace edges are standing up from the lake floor by about a metre in some places. The sonar images of both sets of terraces are strikingly similar."

He described the find as "really significant", especially as many people believed the terraces were destroyed in the devastating eruption.

It seems that instead of being ruined, they were preserved under tens of metres of mud that exploded out of the original Lake Rotomahana.

"I've had people say to me that this is New Zealand's Titanic and I think it's a lot bigger than that," the scientist said.

The work has confirmed that remnants of both structures still exist, but it remains unclear if the entire terraces are intact beneath the water.

"What we'd like to do from this point on is penetrate through the lake floor and through the mud. Because what we've done so far only allows us to see what's on the lake floor."

Despite the exciting development, the terraces are unlikely to ever regain the international appeal they once claimed.

Historic records show more than one thousand tourists made the difficult boat voyage from Europe and the United States each year, spending a further 24 hours on a horse and buggy from Auckland just to see the cascading forms.

"It was an incredible sight by all accounts and one that very wealthy people would come from all over to see," said Stephen Woods, who skippers a daily boat cruise on the lake.

"But as long as it's under the water, it isn't ever going to be what it was - a wonderful place to see, to bathe, to be."
"In that sense it's still gone from us forever."