So today I am at a place called Pigeon Bush  which is a really extraordinary landform in  

the Wairarapa about 50 kilometers northeast of  Wellington City. As you can see here with this  

drone view there is a long sloping hillside  going off into the distance with flat ground  

on the one side and a slope on the other.  That is the line of the Wairarapa Fault.  

Now right behind me here you can see a  deep gully coming through that hillside  

with a little trickle of water making a small  stream coming across just where I'm standing.  

It's a very small little riverbed here. We have a  very deep cut riverbed with a very small riverbed  

just in front of it. A really interesting thing  that you can see is just to the side of me there,  

is another little stream bed but it has no gully  behind it. So it's like a stream bed with no  

source. There's nowhere for the water to have  reached it and it is now a dry abandoned channel  

and there's even a second one some  distance further along the slope.  

So we have these two dead stream channels and  the gully and a place where the modern stream is  

flowing through. So what's going on here is  that in 1855 there was a huge magnitude 8.2  

earthquake along this fault and what used  to be the case was that gully was feeding  

the next stream bed along. In that earthquake  the whole of the land to one side of the fault  

was shunted sideways and several meters up  to create the situation that we have now.  

And even before that last earthquake which was  in 1855 there is evidence of a previous one where  

the stream has also been offset sometime before  the last earthquake. What i'm going to do now is  

i'm going to take this tape measure and actually  measure the distance between the abandoned stream  

channel and the new one to see how far the  fault actually moved in the 1855 earthquake.  

So i'm going to stop where i think the middle  of the gully is from here, very approximately,  

so this is not of absolutely accurate measurement  - I would say give or take a meter on either side.  

But the measurement here says 17 meters. So  what that means is in the last earthquake  

this fault line ruptured and pushed the land  sideways by approximately 16 , 17 or 18 meters  

in this area. And it will also have pushed the  land up on the far side of the fault by about  

a few meters not sure how much exactly. That  offset on the Wairarapa Fault is the greatest  

earthquake offset on a fault line  on land globally on planet earth!

What i'm going to do now is I'm going to  take the tape measure in the other direction  

to see how far the previous earthquake  shunted this fault sideways.

So here I am at the start of the measuring point  and now I'm going over to the next gully along.

Okay so now I'm coming across to the previous  stream bed and I hope you're super impressed by my  

multi-talented filming with a  camera and a drone at the same time!  

So I think this is about the center of the  previous stream bed and it is 14 meters  

from that last stream bed. So the earthquake  previous to 1855 which would have been  

a number of hundreds of years before 1855 shunted  the land on one side of this fault at least 14  

meters sideways. And then the 1855 earthquake  shunted it again by even more than that.  

So I hope you're impressed by this world  record-breaking fault near Wellington New Zealand!