19/04/2026
Our hottest office yet 🔥 Te Manaroa Spring.
No desks.
No chairs.
Just water surging to 99°C from deep beneath the ground.
This is a happy place for our volcano monitoring team.
⏰ Once a year, they collect samples from this extreme environment near Rotorua. In fact, the spring is the largest single source of natural boiling water in New Zealand.
You might call this work risky business.
We call it precision science.
The spring is too dangerous to approach, so water samples are taken safely from a viewing platform using a bottle attached to a long extendable pole.
Why go to all this effort?
Because changes in the water’s chemistry can reveal what’s happening deep below the surface 👉 deep inside the volcanic system.
Every sample is then brought back to our Wairakei laboratory for detailed analysis.
Sometimes, the earliest warnings come from the hottest places on Earth.
📸 Thomas Brakenrig
