Pancake Rocks
Interesting facts
- The coastal hills between Punakaiki and Barrytown hold the only known breeding colonies of the Westland petrel anywhere on Earth.
- The limestone is almost pure calcium carbonate, built from the shells of countless sea creatures that once thrived off a cluster of low islands.
- The blowholes work like pistons: incoming waves trap and compress air in sea caves, blasting air and water up through openings in the roof.
- Two forces carve the headland together: rainwater slowly dissolving the limestone along cracks, and the sea undercutting caverns until they collapse.
- A local sag in the Earth's crust at Punakaiki preserved the limestone layers that erosion stripped from most of the surrounding region.
- Patches of old beach gravel and sand still lie on top of the headland, stranded there as the land rose out of the sea.
- In 1846 Charles Heaphy sketched explorer Thomas Brunner's terrier Rover being hauled up the nearby Te Miko cliffs on a flax rope.
- Gold-rush diggers waiting for low tide at the nearby Pororari lagoon carved names into a limestone overhang nicknamed the 'Post Office'.
- Fur seals haul out on the rocks below the headland, and rare Hector's dolphins are often seen close to shore.
- Before 2020 around half a million visitors a year passed through Punakaiki, with up to about 6,000 a day at peak times.
Why it is worth it
On the wild West Coast of New Zealand's South Island, the headland of Dolomite Point looks as if it were built from stacks of giant grey pancakes. Layer upon layer of thin limestone slabs, separated by narrow grooves, rise in towers and walls above the surf, and in between them the Tasman Sea has hollowed out chasms, surge pools and caverns. When a big swell rolls in at high tide, water is forced up through vertical shafts in the rock and bursts from the blowholes in roaring plumes of spray; the Putai Blowhole at the centre of the site is the most dramatic of them.
The limestone began as shell debris on the floor of a warm, shallow sea in the Oligocene, around 30 to 22 million years ago, when most of the continent of Zealandia lay underwater. Buried under later sand and mud, it was compacted and cemented into rock, then lifted above the sea by the same crustal movements that raised the Southern Alps. The pancake effect comes from a process called stylobedding: under great pressure, impurities in the limestone gathered into thin horizontal planes, producing alternating bands of hard limestone and softer, mud-rich rock. Rain, wind and salt spray wear away the weak bands faster, so the stronger layers stand out like a stack of crêpes. The flat top of the headland is an old beach surface, formed at sea level about 100,000 years ago and since raised by some 35 metres.
The rocks lie within Paparoa National Park, next to the small village of Punakaiki, which sits between the mouths of the Pororari and Punakaiki rivers. A loop of paths winds among the formations, out to viewing platforms above the blowholes and surge pools. Early gold-rush travellers, who crossed this headland on the coastal route in the 1860s, left no record of the extraordinary rocks just off their track.
Getting there
The Pancake Rocks are at Punakaiki on State Highway 6, the only through road on the West Coast, about 46 km north of Greymouth and 56 km south of Westport. The nearest airport is Westport Airport (WSZ), about 47 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Pancake Rocks and Blowholes are a coastal rock formation at Punakaiki on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand. They are a popular visitor attraction.
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