EARTH MOVEMENT IN HAWKE’S BAY

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27073, 23 June 1953, Page 12

EARTH MOVEMENT IN HAWKE’S BAY

Average Rate About Nine Inches A Year FURTHER EARTHQUAKES POSSIBLE (New Zealand Press Association) NELSON, June 22. Considerable interest was aroused at a New Zealand geological conference in Nelson today when Mr T. L. Grant Taylor, of Napier, quoted figures supplied by the Lands arid Survey Department which suggested that parts of the Hawke’s Bay district had risen as much as 25 feet in the 60 years between 1872 and 1932, while other parts appeared to have subsided 17 feet. Mr Grant Taylor showed how the heights of trigonometrical stations calculated from the early survey and the survey made immediately after the 1931 Napier earthquake varied in a systematic manner that in his opinion could not be due to errors of observation or calculation. “A large block of country between Wairoa and Mahia has been depressed 10ft to 18ft, while to the west of Wairoa the land has risen between 20ft and 25ft,” said Mr Grant Taylor. The average rate of movement wag about nine inches a year. “This rate of movement indicates that a major mountain building period is now in progress, comparable with any of the great earth movements of the past,” Mr Grant Taylor said. There was no certainty that the movement would continue. There might now be a long period of quiescence. But. one the other hand, further movement might take place accompanied by severe earthquakes, he said.