The Tweed Volcano was active about 20 million years ago.
Volcanic eruptions lasted about three million years.
The shaped volcano basin has been hollowed out by the erosion effects of the landform induced, very high local rainfall.
The central once molten hard rock core of the volcano is Mount Warning, aka Wollumbin.
The volcano basin’s encompassing walls are exposed in the north, they are a high, vertical, hard-rock, …
This kind of geological formation is called an ‘extinct volcano erosional caldera’.
——————–
Australia was once at the south pole, there was no ice, it was so warm that there were crocodiles.
The mountainous entire eastern side of the continent was rainforest, inland Australia was a shallow warm sea. [Sea levels were higher because there was no ice.]
As the continent moved up the globe the landscape of the whole of Australia became drier.
The east continent rainforest dried, and died.
Eucylipts, comfortable in the drier weather, became the new indigenous species.
———-
Also here within the Tweed volcano erosion caldera the rainforest dried and much of the caldera rainforest too was evolutionarily superseded by eucylipt forest, “majestic stands of … quote by whatshisname, the first recorded European account of the forests here”.
However, because of the caldera landform and consequent high rainfall, a surviving remnant of the original east Australia rainforest species ecology had survived. !
The Tweed erosion volcano caldera and its subsequent wet weather pattern has provided a refuge for the original eastern rainforest ecology, which one time occupied the whole of the eastern part of the continent.
“Rainforest pockets had persisted in the wet refugia of the Tweed Caldera valleys.”
The varied species of plants, fungi, insects, birds, marsupials, … all of the inter-related, interdependent lifeforms of the rainforest ecology, had sustained, self-sustaining, regenerating again and again over xxx,000 years.
It was protected and had survived.
In the caldera today the plants we live with include tree species of the original authentic rainforest of xxx thousand years ago. Invasive species mostly populate the landscape, interspersed with rainforest trees here and there.
Not very long ago the caldera was logged … text find.
—————–
It was all in existence until very, very recently.
Today, some landholders themselves and contracted parties work restoring damaged and alien species invaded native forests and trees are being planted.
How to help what little is left of the rainforest ecology of the caldera? Heres how: Value the caldera ecology, what little is left of it.
PS. The rainforest species trees are gorgeous, the ecology they support is equally gorgeous too.
——————
NASA: “The [following] image can be seen in 3 dimensions (3-D) by viewing the following left image with the right eye and the right image with the left eye (cross-eyed viewing).
When stereoscopically merged, the result is a vertically exaggerated view of Earth’s surface in its full three dimensions.
