We’ve now left Canterbury and driven north to Kaikoura where the Hope fault meets the Pacific Ocean. This is a truly magical area with snow-capped peaks running straight to the water. The Hope fault is the southernmost of the Marlborough fault system, a series of right-lateral strike-slip faults that strike northeast. The Alpine fault, the big dextral slip fault that forms the backbone of the southern Alps and has most of the Pacific-Australian plate converge rate across it begins to lose its slip to the north and apparently shunts that motion onto the Marlborough system. The Hope fault probably takes on the majority of that motion according to GNS folks such as Kelvin Berryman and Robert Langridge.

We camped near the beach last night and saw amazing stars. The Milky Way was a bright band in the sky, constellations were unrecognizable, familiar constellations were missing. The most amazing sights in the southern sky are the Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies that are prominent. Nothing like them exists in the northern hemispheric sky.

Today we head southwestward along the Hope fault. We’ll look for evidence for large-scale right slip displacement. We’ll stop in Hanmer Basin, a large pull-apart basin that Rob Langridge and I worked on a couple of years ago. From there we’ll head to Lewis Pass and across the Alpine fault.

All is good.

Cheers