Seabed mapping

The Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha'apai (HT-HH) volcano was like a massive shotgun blast from the deep, generating the biggest atmospheric explosion recorded on Earth in more than 100 years.

NIWA is leading a New Zealand partnership to map the South and West Pacific Ocean's seabed as part of a worldwide initiative to map the entire globe’s seafloor.

This dataset provides the most up-to-date bathymetry of one of the largest areas of deep-water seabed under national jurisdiction. The 250m resolution gridded bathymetric data set encompasses New Zealand's Exclusive Economic Zone and is available in multiple high-resolution file formats to suit a range of imagery and mapping needs.

The 2022 Tonga volcanic eruption triggered the fastest underwater flow ever recorded.

NIWA scientists will be in Hawkes Bay this week to map the seabed to measure the effects of Cyclone Gabrielle

A New Zealand-led team has completed the fullest investigation to date into January’s eruption of the underwater Tongan volcano.

New findings from the record-breaking Tongan volcanic eruption are “surprising and unexpected”, say scientists from New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

High-resolution mapping has produced the first ever global estimates of coastal habitat damage caused by anchoring.

Our team onboard RV Tangaroa are equipped with all the tech and tools they need to explore the undersea changes caused by the devastating volcanic eruption in Tonga earlier this year.

We have sampled 11 stations today, with different pieces of equipment, starting with rock dredges on a ridge close to Hunga Ha’apai. The samples taken returned a trove of rock specimens that got the geologist onboard excited.

The January eruption of the Tongan volcano Hunga Tonga – Hunga Ha’apai triggered tsunamis as far away as the Caribbean. NIWA scientists are onboard RV Tangaroa surveying the ocean around the volcano, working to understand the largest eruption of its kind since 1981 so they can help increase our knowledge about similar volcanoes around the world.

NIWA and The Nippon Foundation are undertaking a mission to discover the undersea impacts of the recent Tongan volcanic eruption.