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New Zealand in space and time

A quick guide for northern hemisphere residents on how big, old, isolated, and temperate New Zealand really is. Hint: it’s not a small tropical South Pacific island.

written Jan 1, 2014 • by Jon Sullivan • Category: Wild Changes

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I was at a party in Philadelphia, USA, back in the 1990s, and was asked where I was from. “I’m from New Zealand”, I said proudly. “Oh, your English is very good,” was the reply.

To my surprise, if the party goers had any idea about where New Zealand was, it was that it might be somewhere near Greenland, or maybe Finland. Some bright spark thought it was part of Australia. That was as close as they got.

So when I lecture visiting international students about New Zealand ecology, I’m very careful to first set the scene: New Zealand is big, old, isolated, and temperate. These four things explain a lot about the strange ecology we have.

To help emphasise New Zealand being big, isolated, and temperate, I made some maps. I took a nice NASA composite satellite image of the world and cut New Zealand out from the southern hemisphere and pasted it into the northern hemisphere at the equivalent latitudes. I placed it as far from the nearest continent as New Zealand is from Australia. And, yes, the closest land mass to New Zealand is Australia, but that’s still over 2,100 km (1,300 miles) away to the northwest.

Check out the maps. It surprised me, when I made them, just how big and isolated New Zealand really is.

New Zealand in the northern Pacific
New Zealand, if it was in the northern Pacific off the western coast of North America. That's tiny Hawaii down in the bottom left.
New Zealand in the northern Pacific
New Zealand, if it was in the northern Pacific off the eastern coast of Asia.
New Zealand in the northern Atlantic
New Zealand, if it was in the northern Atlantic between eastern North America and western Europe.

The other big thing that’s needed to set the scene for understanding New Zealand ecology is that people arrived here very recently. There are lots of trees in old growth forest throughout New Zealand that are centuries older than human settlement of New Zealand.

big tree, small boy
One of the many old trees in New Zealand that pre-date the arrival of people. The photo shows an ancient tōtara tree, Podocarpus totara, in Peel Forest, South Canterbury, that is thought to be over 1,000 years old. That would have made it already over two centuries old when the first Polynesian settlers arrived at the end of their epic journey from the Cook Islands.

To help put this into perspective, I show the following table of selected notable events in human history.

Event Years ago (approx.)
Europeans settle NZ 200
Colombus finds America 500
Polynesians settle NZ 750
Norse settle Greenland (briefly) 1,100
Roman empire falls 1,600
Egyptian pyramids built 4,500
Last glacial period ends 10,000
People settle North America 14,000
People settle Australia 70,000
Modern Homo sapiens appear 500,000

New Zealand is big and old and isolated, which caused it to develop a globally unique and unusual biological diversity. People, and with them much of the rest of the world’s temperate species, collided with this unique biological diversity so recently that there’s still a lot of the wreckage lying about.

We have a better view here than arguably anywhere else in the world of the impacts of people and our associated species have on a naive biodiversity.

With that scene set, I’m ready to introduce some of New Zealand’s species and biological communities and their ecology.