A particular pleasure in the intertidal zone: seeing and experiencing – even entering – wonderful things that are only available to you at low tide, or at certain very low tides…
Comments closedCategory: New Zealand
More famous for its (diminishing, via global warming) spectacular, fully submerged, “underwater forests”, kelp can sometimes be found, alive and well, on “dry” land.
The land in question is only “dry”, briefly, at low tide.
Also, I imagine, this circumstance would only be possible where the climate is cool and humid.
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Where a particular intertidal zone’s “bottom” has a very gentle slope, even relatively modest tidal ranges will yield spectacular transformations, often twice-daily
One such place is immediately east of Dunedin, on the southeastern side of New Zealand’s South Island.
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Only a modest number of human feet have walked its actual sands, but every day of our so-called “21st” century many millions of human eyes see this singular beach, virtually.
An image of it is the “screensaver” viewed countless times by subscribers to Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system.
Doubtless, most of those subscribers have no idea of what and where is this “iconic” beach.
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So much of Australia is parched, low-lying, flat(-tish)
So much of New Zealand is well-watered, extravagantly green, and its horizons usually include substantial hills or mountains.
Understandably, many visitors to NZ – Australians, especially – are utterly beguiled, and swallow, whole, the assiduously marketed fiction that New Zealand is “green” and “pure”.
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#6 in this series looked out to sea, from a bay on the western side of the Coromandel Peninsula – a popular “weekend escape” destination for many residents of Auckland.
This post’s featured image was taken from almost exactly the same spot, but looking into a bay whose waters were very much deeper two centuries ago.
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The location pictured in this post’s featured image is not very many kilometres away from the one in #5 in this series.
It is not at all close to the North Queensland coast, where Cairns sits at 16.51 Degrees South – unsurprisingly, a location where mangroves thrive.
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“Our” planet’s water surfaces are all shifting, always.
This reality is not always readily apparent.
It is, however, strikingly evident when one looks across a substantial intertidal zone when the tide is “out”.
This post’s musical component is Surface Level III – a particularly beautiful piece from Appearance, Chris Abrahams’ 2020 solo piano album.
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Near the northern tip of New Zealand’s North Island is the so-called Ninety Mile Beach”.
It is no less magnificent for its actual length – “only” 88 kilometres.
Musically, today offers a sublime, spacious, shore-inspired instrumental solo, plus an also-spare song which depicts a lovely state of mind:
lost in a seagull’s flight
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Make sure you first see/read (and listen to) #56 in this series – this post is a sequel to that.
Same New Zealand place, same North American song…very different results.
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