Sasha Says - Lake Ohau Moraines

<p><strong>Geoeducator: </strong>So we turned off the main road from between Omarama and Tekapo up to Lake Ohau and immediately when you leave there you're just surrounded - the road is just on either side this beautiful long yellow grass it's just stunning with the backdrop of these just sharp grey mountains. With this, you can just see the rock slides coming off down the side. And we made our way across some really hummocky ground. And Lisa was saying to me, you know there's moraine around here, where is the moraine? And we were looking for the moraine. And we're like, you know what - we're on the moraine - we're surrounded by the moraine. So it lead onto a bit of discussion about what is glacial moraine. And I hope to put something on the Facebook page a bit later, possibly next week, just a little bit about the formation of moraine and different types of moraine you get. So just as an overview, obviously, moraines are a by-product of glaciation and they get left behind as a moraine retreats rather than advances. When a glacier advances, it tends to decimate everything in front of it. So as it retreats, it leaves deposits behind from the sides. They're called lateral moraines. And at the end, which are called terminal moraines. So as it retreats it leaves behind a history of its existence really. When we made our way up the valley further to the lake itself and if you looked down the edges of the valley, adjacent to the lake, you can see striations on the wall of the valley. Now these are remnants - this is a record of the glacier itself where it's carved into the hard rock surface of the valley. So you can see there are horizontal striations as well as little lips on the rock edges where the glacier has decreased in height as it has retreated. So we've got a really amazing record of glaciation just from what we can see on the surface with those striations and also with the moraines. Just two things to keep an eye out if people who are up there on the Alps 2 Ocean. Now, I just must point out, we meet a fantast