[Geysers] Rabili Geyser

[Ronald Keam]

In August 1970 I attended an ANZAAS congress in Port Moresby in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, then administered by Australia.  I took a post-congress excursion to New Britain to look at the volcanoes and also the thermal area of Pangalu at Talasea.  The Rabili 'geyser' seems to have been behaving in much the same way as it is shown in the photograph posted by Jeff Cross, with massive upheavals of the water continuing repeatedly and without intermission within its basin.  Overall in the course of about a couple of hours I noticed no variation and would class its behaviour as being that of a continual spouter.  Very little of the water splashed out of the basin.  No surface outflow anywhere in the adjacent few hundreds of square metres of themally active ground indicated that an actual discharge of liquid water was occurring.  On many occasions in our youthful exuberance Ted Lloyd and I had surreptitiously soaped boiling springs in New Zealand, so I had arrived at Talasea with the necessary ingredient and proceeded to conduct a comparable experiment on Rabili.  What happened was quite unexpected but instructive:  Over the course of about a minute the water-level in the basin receded two or three feet revealing from the side wall (to the left in the photograph Jeff posted) a fierce jet of steam, perhaps four inches across, emerging a little above the new water level, slightly upwardly inclined, and directed across the basin.  The noise created was very like that which one hears when a geothermal bore at Wairakei is opened.  The residual water in the basin lay almost undisturbed at its lower level.  This new behaviour persisted during the remaining couple of hours I spent examining the Pangalu area.  No doubt when the minerals in the water had completed reacting with the soap the former behavioural regime was re-established (and clearly had done so as shown in the photo Jeff supplied).

The visit to Talasea was interesting in another way.  It was the site of a contingent of police (all native men) and in the course of a day there were parades on the immaculately kept sealed areas and lawns, under the command of Australian officers.  The accommodation was clearly built originally for the official personnel connected with the police establishment.  I could not help but being emphatically reminded of the 1930s tales of empire by Somerset Maugham and I am very glad to have had such an opportunity to have seen a living relic of this era.  Independence came peacefully a year or so later and I must say that nowhere in the Territory did I distinguish any tension between the local population and the temporary 'colonial' administrators.  (And I did travel as far as Mt Hagen near the centre of Papua on the main island of New Guinea.)

Ron Keam

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Here's a link to a photograph of "Rabili Geyser:"

<http://pg.geoview.info/rabili_geyser_talasea,80148362p>http://pg.geoview.info/rabili_geyser_talasea,80148362p

Jeff Cross
jeff.cross at utah.edu


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