EARTHQUAKES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22398, 20 October 1934, Page 14

EARTHQUAKES

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —In the Daily Times of October 15 there was a full reply by the Royal Society of New Zealand to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce, which has maintained that the risk from earthquakes is negligible north of Huntly and south of Rangitata. The society maintains that the whole of New Zealand ia subject to major earthquake shocks. It claims that this is a matter of supreme importance, and that a false impression may become current if no public reply is made to the statements of the chamber. Now, in the seventy-one years ago paragraph in this morning’s Daily Times (October 19), we read: “In his report to the superintendent, Mr M'Kerrow, the district surveyor, thus remarks concerning the outlet of the Wakatipu Lake; ‘lt is plain that the Wakatipu Lake must have extended formerly over the low fertile tract of a country that extends east from Frankton to the Crown Ridge. . . . The old channel of a large river leading away from the south end of the lake at Kingston is very suggestive that then the overflow of the lake had passed away by it, and down the Mataura, to the sea. Examination of the valley in which this old channel lies does not really explain the cause of this rearrangement in Nature, for no sudden upheaval has there dammed the waters of the lake back from their ancient exit; the old channel remains as distinct and as well defined as though the change had only been a thing of a few years. The waters of the lake have receded rather more than a mile in distance, and left the old channel high and dry. The very abrupt • gorge through which the Kawarau (the present outlet of the lake) flows suggests that the change has been brought about by the sudden erupting force of an earthquake opening a pass through the mountains lower than the level of the then lake, and that the present deep gutter-like channel of the Kawarau has been the subsequent slow and gradual wearing down of the channel by the rapid current that sweeps along it.’ ” So, the complacent reflection of those of us who live south of Christchurch that we need not be troubled with thinking about earthquakes receives a severe shock. — I am, etc.. Scribe. October 10.