Testosterone by Timothy Poulton

Testosterone by Timothy Poulton

If you go down to Koekohe beach in New Zealand, you can be sure of a big surprise. In front of you, scattered like enormous marbles from some long abandoned game between giants, are hundreds of giant spherical rocks. Or are they the eggshells of sea-born dragons? The Moeraki boulders present us with a mystery – what are they and how on earth did they get there? Some are isolated but may occur in clusters. That they are here is the result of three things – erosion, concretion and time. First, the waves, inexorable and patient, have pounded the local bedrock for countless millennia. The mudstone on the beach – rock which was initially mud and clay – is slowly but surely eroded. Underneath are the boulders that the mudstone – in its original wet form, helped to form. However, the boulders were not there, to begin with – that came later. Many of the Moeraki boulders give the impression of being completely spherical – and they almost are. They are septarian concretions – a sedimentary rock that has had the space between its grains filled up by minerals which acted like cement. Concretions form inside the layers of mud and clay and are not, as some think, boulders buried over time. Whatever you believe they certainly make a stunning foreground for landscape photographers.

Timothy Poulton: Photos