Pareidolia in the Taupō volcanic zone: How misconstructed survey cartography condemned the white terrace, wonder of the world

A. R. Bunn

doi:10.24294/jgc11791

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Pareidolia in the Taupō volcanic zone: How misconstructed survey cartography condemned the white terrace, wonder of the world

A. R. Bunn

Journal of Geography and Cartography 2026, 9(1), 11791; https://doi.org/10.24294/jgc11791

Submitted：10 Jun 2025

Accepted：14 Apr 2026

Published：30 Apr 2026

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Abstract

Chaotic conditions prevailed after the 1886 Tarawera eruption, when the loss of the Pink and White Terraces, New Zealand’s Eighth Wonder of the World, was rapidly declared. Four days after the eruption, surveyor Percy Smith approached about four kilometres from his supposed site of the White Terrace and mistakenly identified what he described as a “west-opening horseshoe bay” adjacent to a hill, concluding that the Terrace possibly lay within the newly formed crater. Pareidolia arises where ambiguous visual information intersects with cultural attachment and confirmation bias. This paper traces the subsequent life of Smith’s claims through six parliamentary, government, and academic reports; two official audits; five survey maps; six contemporary artworks; Smith’s later reminiscences; and a final interview. Forensic analysis of his survey maps shows that Smith altered the reported position of the White Terrace on two occasions and introduced topographic features during the period in which his work was being audited by sceptical government ministers. These early representations established an intellectual primacy that shaped official and academic understandings of the Terrace’s fate into the twenty-first century. Indigenous Māori observers disputed Smith’s conclusions at the time, but their testimony was disregarded under prevailing interracial conditions. This study extends the topography of the Rotomahana Basin through new altimetry, LiDAR mapping of the Kaiwaka Channel (also misidentified by Smith), reconstruction of his lost audit bearings, and derivation of an error ellipse for the White Terrace. The delineation of Smith’s maps by Harding introduced cartographic pareidolia and confirmation bias. Taken together, the evidence indicates that Smith’s successive claims for the White Terrace’s location in the crater lake were unsupported by direct observation or by reliable survey control. This paper argues that the principal source of long-standing misinterpretation at Tarawera lies not only in the field surveys themselves, but in the later delineation process. Here, cartographic pattern completion transformed uncertain observations into apparently objective geometries that then guided subsequent perception and belief into the current century.

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References

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