Epicentre of learning: the dairy farm teaching scientists how earthquakes form

When dairy farmers Gray and Vicki Eatwell purchased a block of farming land just outside the tiny west coast village of Whataroa in New Zealand, the real-estate agent gestured vaguely at a cliff of striking, green-tinged rock on the border of their property at Gaunt Creek. “She said: ‘That’s the alpine fault, the meeting of the Australian and Pacific plates’,” says Gray Eatwell. “But we thought no more of it, locals were blasé about it. I had no idea my whole life would become about that rock.” With one quiet pub and only a few hundred residents, Whataroa is an easy place to overlook. But to scientists around the world Gaunt Creek invokes a sense of wonder, as every year dozens of top international geologists descend on this remote stretch of coast to study the temperamental fault.Although it is not unique to be able to physically view fault lines that have cracked through the earth’s crust, they are unusual and hugely important to science.Geologists agree that the site at Gaunt Creek, where they have set up a seismic observatory and embarked on an ambitious international drilling project involving more than a dozen countries, is one of the best in the world.