Whakaari / White Island
Interesting facts
- The island covers only about 325 hectares and rises 321 metres, but it is just the tip of a much larger volcano whose bulk lies beneath the sea.
- The volcano has been built over roughly the past 150,000 years from two overlapping cones, named Ngatoro and Central.
- Its full Māori name, Te Puia o Whakaari, is usually translated as 'the dramatic volcano'.
- James Cook named it White Island on 1 November 1769 because it always appeared white to his crew, probably from the dense clouds of steam around it.
- Sulphur mining was attempted in the mid-1880s, from 1898 to 1901, in 1913–1914 and again from 1923 until the 1930s, when the ore proved too poor.
- Between December 1975 and September 2000 the volcano was in almost continuous eruption for nearly 25 years.
- George Raymond Buttle bought the island in 1936, and in 1953 it was declared a private scenic reserve.
- Large breeding colonies of Australasian gannets make the island an Important Bird Area, despite the volcanic fumes.
Why it is worth it
Whakaari has been killing people on a schedule of roughly once a generation for over a century, and it was doing so long before the eruption that most people now associate with the island. In September 1914, a landslide from the crater's unstable inner wall buried a sulphur-mining camp on the crater floor, killing all ten workers there instantly — the only survivor of the settlement was the camp cat, later nicknamed Peter the Great, found alive weeks later. Sulphur mining, extracting the pure yellow deposits the volcano's fumaroles constantly replenish, continued on and off at Whakaari into the 1930s despite the risk, because the ore was that valuable.
On 9 December 2019, a short, violent eruption sent an ash column roughly 3.7 kilometres into the sky while 47 tourists and guides were on the crater floor, most of them day-trippers from cruise ships docked at nearby Tauranga and Whakatāne. Twenty-two people died and dozens more suffered severe burns; the disaster led to a landmark WorkSafe prosecution in New Zealand, with several tour operators and a scientific monitoring agency held to account for the risk they exposed visitors to on an active vent with no reliable warning system.
Whakaari is New Zealand's most continuously active volcano. Scenic flights circle the island at a safe altitude, giving visitors a look at the sulphur-crusted crater and its permanent plume of steam without setting foot on ground that geologists still can't reliably predict.
Good to know
Visitors see Whakaari/White Island by scenic flight or by boat cruise that stays offshore.
Getting there
52 km from Whakatane. Whakatāne Airport (WHK) is about 50 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Whakaari / White Island, also known as White Island or Whakaari, is an active andesite stratovolcano situated 48 km (30 mi) from the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, in the Bay of Plenty. The island covers an area of approximately 325 ha, which is just the peak of a much larger submarine volcano.
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