Pancake Rocks Blow Holes

Description

There’s a rugged beauty about Punakaiki Pancake Rocks & Blowholes where an unrelenting drama plays out as the mighty Tasman Sea crashes into these iconic limestone formations. The Pancake Rocks at Dolomite Point are limestone formations that began forming 30 million years ago when lime-rich fragments of dead marine creatures were deposited on the seabed. These were later overlaid by layers of soft mud and clay. Earthquakes raised them from the seabed to the level we see today. Each ‘pancake’ consists of a layer of limestone layer made up of tiny shell fragments, separated from the next pancake by a thin layer of siltstone. Thousands of years of rain, wind and sea spray have etched the softer siltstone into nearly-horizontal grooves, and rounded the edges of the limestone layers, which together look like giant layers of pancakes.

The blowholes at Dolomite Point, Punakaiki have been formed through combined processes of erosion. The action of waves, combined with karst erosion in joints and faults in the limestone rock, leads to the creation of caverns that become sea caves. When the sea cave erodes upwards and towards the land, it can create an opening to the surface. Incoming waves trap air in the sea cave and the air inside the cave becomes compressed, leading to the ejection of air and water upwards from the top of the blowhole.

The Punakaiki Marine Reserve surrounds the Pancake Rocks and blowholes and covers much of the coastline at the edge of the Paparoa National Park. State Highway 6 is the only through-road on the West Coast, and a large number of visitors pass through Punakaiki. In 2017, it was estimated that there were 450,000 visitors, and many of these take the short walk to view the Pancake Rocks and Blowholes.