Saturday, June 10, 2006

7June06 Taupo

7June06 Wednesday

Today we spent in Taupo doing a little relaxing and sightseeing.  We started out by driving up to the Volcanic Center to see what they had on display.  It was informative with a large topographic model mounted horizontally so that you could see and visualize the topography of a large area of the north island that has a lot of thermal and volcanic activity.  The regions of Rotorua and Taupo are especially active areas.  We viewed four movies that showed the results of a number of earthquakes that were significant in the amount of destruction and magnitude.  They also had a listing of seismographic data of activities for the last couple of months.  It appears that about every 3 or 4 days there is some type of recordable activity.  Of some note on the list was an earthquake of over 7 on the reicter scale in early May that occurred on one of the South Pacific islands.  We had heard about this one the day after it occurred and that there had been some concern about a tsunami that was going to hit New Zealand but it never materialized.  We only heard about it after the fact.

 

We left there and went over to the area where the steam wells are that feed steam to the geothermal power generating plant just north of Taupo.  It wasn’t marked but we found the road that goes back to the area where the steam wells are that supply the plant.  We ended up at an overview where you could see a number of the producing wells and all the pipes that carry the steam to the generating plant.  Thewells are drilled to approximately 2000 meters deep and they produce steam at 230-260 degrees C.  The steam is piped asfar as 5 km to the generating station through 300 to 1200 mm pipes.  It’s quite a sight and operation with a lot of steam venting from the wells and generally everywhere.  Some of the expansion loops were large enough to drive our KEA through.  The sign said that over the 5 km length the pipes can expand as much as 15 meters.  They are generating around 185 MW of power there.  The plant was the second in the world to be build.

 

From there we went into town and had lunch at a nice café and then Joan waited while I got a much needed haircut.

 

 

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