Three years later, at 2.11pm on 9 December 2019, there was another eruption – one that came without warning. It would have been a wake-up call that produced only meetings over cups of tea, with scribbled notes, bottom-line business interests weighed against risk, and some kind of agreed reform. You might, therefore, be tempted to wish it into the daylight, when tourists would have been afoot, because then it might have garnered more notice – since it came in pulses of ascending violence, there would have been time to run, and the headlines would have been nothing more than “Tour operators reassess risk after near miss”. You might wonder if this eruption triggered any changes, but it happened at night, with no witnesses, so it simply passed on by. (Image credit: Michael Schade) No warning The last photo he had taken while still on the island was date stamped 1.49pm – 22 minutes before the deadly eruption. At 2.12pm American tourist Michael Schade photographed the eruptive column surging into the sky from tour boat Phoenix. The pyroclastic surge, though just 5mm thick at its extremities, had nonetheless covered 95 per cent of the track. The resulting scientific paper was published on 1 April last year, and its authors warned: “These eruptions clearly pose a significant hazard to the tourists that visit the island.” More than a quarter of the walking track had been bombarded by rock fragments. Geologists from GNS Science, NZ’s leading provider of geoscientific research, reconstructed the pulses of the eruption from acoustic and seismic data, and, three weeks later when they could safely land on the island again, began figuring out the reach of those pulses.
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