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Mount Warning - Wollumbin World
Heritage listed Mount Warning (Wollumbin) is the remnant central
plug of an ancient volcano. Named by Lieutenant James Cook in 1770,
as a warning to seafarers of the numerous treacherous reefs along
the coast. Wollumbin is a sacred place of great significance to
the people of the Bundjalung tribe. It is a traditional place of
cultural law, initiation and spiritual education.
Mt. Warning is one of the biggest erosion caldera's in the world.
Caldera is a massive collapse of the ground following explosive
eruption of stored magma. |
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| The huge size of the caldera gives us an inkling of what a giant the original shield volcano was. Today the valley is over 1000 meters deep and has a diameter of over forty kilometres. Moving over a hotspot in the earth's crust about 23 million years ago, Mt Warning erupted and over a period of about 3 million years built up into a large and complex central volcano. When it finished about 20 million years ago, the volcano had risen to a height of over 2 kilometres. Layers of ash and lava had been deposited over its outward slopes, to a diameter of about 100 kilometres. This spread the volcano out over an area from Byron Bay in the southeast, and Lismore in the southwest, to Mount Tamborine to the north. |
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Over the past 20 million years the vast majority of the material ejected has been eroded away. What remains is still mighty impressive. Mt Warning, the central plug, and a system of ring dykes, being extremely hard, have resisted erosion, and dominate the valley landscape. The rim of the caldera has been protected by a cap of very hard rock and forms a virtual semi circle of vertical cliffs around the western side of Mt Warning. Now standing just over 1100 meters tall, it is the first peak on the mainland of Australia to be touched by the rising sun.
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