Tasman´s Arch & Devil's Kitchen


Thursday November 1, 2007 (Day 16)

Tasman´s Arch & Devil´s Kitchen


Tasman´s Arch is a natural arch which is really a greatly enlarged tunnel running from the coast along a zone of closely spaced cracks and extending inland to a second zone perpendicular to the first. The roof at the landward end of the tunnel has collapsed but the hole is too large and the sides are too high to form a blowhole. The tunnel was produced by wave action.

Devil´s Kitchen is 60 meters deep and was formed by a similar process to that which has created Tasman's Arch. Basically, if Tasman's Arch collapsed, it would lead to the creation of a landform like the Devils Kitchen. The rocks in which the Blowhole, Tasman's Arch and the Devils Kitchen occur are permian in age (about 250 million years old) and were deposited as silt and sand on the floor of a shallow sea. It is probably that ice floated on the surface. Most of the pebbles from the ice were dropped as it melted.