Woken by shaking and noise in the middle of the night, Susan Gedye headed downstairs, thinking an earthquake had struck her town in the north of New Zealand.
But as she went into the kitchen the noise got louder. Then she spotted the windows had steamed up.
Looking out into the back garden, Gedye saw a geyser had sprung up overnight and was now spewing steam and mud over the kitchen walls as it grew in size.
The family has had to move out due to the risk of the house collapsing.
By the following morning, June 26, it had turned into a “huge mud geyser” saying it was “kind of spectacular” and “a little bit scary.”
“It’s like a huge big crater in the front lawn and there’s mud flying like about 10 meters into the air,” she told the radio station.
Gedye said she had woken to shaking and jolting at about 2 in the morning, thinking “oh there’s a huge earthquake happening here.”
Heading into the kitchen, the sound got louder.
“I panicked, it was shaking everything ... I wasn’t sure what was going on.”
The council told her she was fine to stay in the house for the night.
But in the morning, things had really changed, she said, and the family had to evacuate due to the possibility of a sinkhole falling under the kitchen meaning the house could fall away.
“There was mud flying everywhere, the bank had come away and the engineer said it might be time to go.”
“There are a few cracks around the place and everything is kind of on a lean,” Gedye said.
According to the council, a similar event in 2016 lasted 10 weeks before the newly-formed geyser ran out of steam.
“There is a fault line running under the bank where the mud pool has formed,” said the council statement. “Sometimes heat flow from the Whakarewarewa Village travels along the fault line and comes to the surface.”
Geysers
The city of Rotura lies on the northern side of New Zealand’s North Island.The city is nicknamed “Sulphur City” after the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide emissions that accompany geothermal activity such as the hot springs and bubbling mud pools which are popular with tourists.
But whilst it carries risks for the locals, Rotorua, like other locations in New Zealand, is popular with tourists precisely because of the geothermal activity which produces mud pools and geysers.
The name geyser comes from the Icelandic geysir, which is a name given by Icelanders in the 17th century to refer to a hot spring in southwestern Iceland, where many tourists also go to experience the geothermal sights.
Around half of the world’s known 1,000 geysers can be found in Yellowstone park, also home to the world’s tallest—Steamboat Geyser.
Activity at the world-famous geyser very recently appears to have accelerated, leaving scientists baffled.
The geyser’s shortest break between eruptions took place on June 15 when it blasted three days, three hours, and 48 minutes after its previous eruption, the paper reported.
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