Student showcase

Rhiannon Daymond-King

At the moment Rhiannon is living in Helensville and commuting in to Auckland each day.

She is studying at the University of Auckland, in her second year of her MSc thesis in Geology. In her spare time she is a member of Auckland Sword and Shield, a metal-fighting club, and the secretary of nzLARPS, the New Zealand Live Action Role-Playing Society Inc. She has been a member of its longstanding founder club, Mordavia, for three years now.  She is in the beginning stages of scientifically creating an entire detailed world for a tabletop role-playing game.

The thesis she is working on is the architecture and palaeoecology of a channelised upper slope deposit at Orongo Point, Okahukura Peninsula. Okahukura Peninsula is the southernmost large peninsula on the east side of the Kaipara Harbour, directly opposite its mouth to the Tasman Sea. The area to be covered by this study is a coastal section of early Miocene strata from Lemon Tree Bay Road, around Orongo Point to the west and north towards Gum Store Creek.

Rhiannon will provide an in-depth reconstruction of the internal structure and palaeoenvironments of upper slope and channel deposits in this section, using macrofossil and microfossil ecological evidence. Orongo Point is one of the more important locations in the Okahukura Peninsula because of the outcropping of several different formations of the Waitemata Group, and also because of its detailed sedimentological deposits, myriad cross-cutting channels and its fossiliferous units.

Field work (which she has all but finished) included detailed logging and recording the architecture of cliff sections, constructing a detailed lateral cross-section of the Orongo Point coast, as well as carefully detailing the multiple channel complex and correlating between the bays and areas of minor faulting.