Kevin Explores

19/04/2026

Geology of Emerald Creek Falls

This is my backyard. Emerald Creek Falls, a short drive from Mareeba on the Atherton Tablelands.

I have been flying my drone over these rocks appreciating the beauty and trying to understand what I am looking at. What started as a photography exercise turned into a deep dive into 300 million years of geological history — ancient sea floors, magma forcing its way through cracks kilometres underground, and a waterfall that exists because of a single band of resistant rock.

Full field notes with more drone images - link below.

Cheers
Kevin

https://kevinexplores.substack.com/p/geological-events-contributing-to

15/04/2026

A rainbow over Emerald Creek this afternoon. Hard to resist.

Behind the beauty is a geological story that begins with an ancient ocean floor, runs through volcanic intrusion, fracture, weathering and erosion across hundreds of millions of years — and ends with this waterfall, these boulders, and this valley.

Coming soon.

Emerald Creek Falls, Atherton Tablelands. April 2026.

14/03/2026

Bones K**b: two volcanoes hiding in plain sight

There are two volcanoes at Bones K**b. Most people don't know either of them is there.

The first is the broad, gently sloping hill you see from the Kennedy Highway to the west of Tolga. That's a shield volcano — built 1.79 million years ago from fluid basalt lava that behaved more like a slow flood than an explosion. It spread north for more than 30 km. The red soils under every farm and orchard between here and Mareeba are that lava, weathered over nearly two million years. The hill looks modest because shield volcanoes do — lava that fluid doesn't build steep.

The second volcano is something else entirely. Sitting inside a horseshoe-shaped hollow on the shield's northwestern flank is a scoria cone — steeper, smaller, and 130,000 years younger. Where the shield was built by quiet lava floods, the cone was built by explosive eruptions that hurled molten cinders into the air. They landed hot. Hot enough, in fact, to partially fuse together before cooling — producing columnar jointing in the pyroclastic deposits. Vertical fracture columns of the kind you normally only see in solidified lava flows, not in loose volcanic cinders. The researchers who documented this called it unique within the entire Atherton Basalt Province.

Two eruption styles. Two different ages. One hill from the highway.

Swipe through the gallery — from the shield summit looking northeast across the basalt landscape toward Mareeba, to the close approach on the scoria cone cliff face where that welded zone is visible.

Kevin Explores acknowledges the Wadjanbarra Tableland Yidinji People as the Traditional Custodians of this Country, and pays respect to Elders past, present and emerging.

The full story — what the horseshoe hollow actually means, the two competing theories for the eruptive sequence, and where Bones K**b sits in the volcanic history of the Tablelands — in this week's Field Notes newsletter at https://substack.com/

Cheers, Kevin

PS - I have added more information about location in the images.

P PS - Bones K**b is situated on private property and the owners at the top kindly granted me access.

13/03/2026

11/03/2026

Celebrating Good Riparian Management on Peterson Creek

Flying over the upper Peterson Creek catchment this morning, I was struck by some excellent examples of riparian corridor protection by local landholders - including active restoration work happening right now.

These aerial images show exactly what good catchment management looks like:
- Wide, vegetated buffers protecting creek banks
- Fresh tree planting visible as lighter patches - restoration in progress!
- Multi-layered vegetation - mature trees, shrubs, and groundcover working together
- Livestock excluded from creek corridors (note the cattle grazing safely away from waterways)
- Natural creek meanders protected and intact
- Wildlife corridors connecting forest remnants across the landscape

This isn't just good environmental practice - it's smart farm management:
- Stock health - cattle have cleaner water from off-stream sources
- Erosion control - vegetated banks hold soil in place
- Property values - protected riparian zones enhance land value
- Biodiversity - these corridors support native species that control pests naturally
- Water quality - vegetation filters runoff before it reaches the creek

A huge thank to TREAT (Trees for the Evelyn and Atherton Tablelands) for decades of work creating wildlife corridors like the one visible in these images. These green threads across our landscape do double duty - habitat for wildlife AND water quality protection.

Special recognition to the landholders actively planting NOW - those lighter patches visible from the air are fresh revegetation areas. You're not just maintaining what's there, you're actively improving it. Thank you.

Context matters: As Barron Catchment Care works with Yungaburra Landcare Group and many other stakeholders on Peterson Creek water quality monitoring, these images remind us that solutions exist. Where riparian zones are protected and managed well, we see healthier waterways and healthier farms.

Not every property is there yet - and that's okay. Change takes time, resources, and support. But these images show what's possible when landholders, community groups, and local knowledge come together.

To the farmers protecting these riparian corridors: Thank you. You're leading the way.

To those considering improving riparian management: Barron Catchment Care can help with advice, potential funding, and connecting you with others who've done it successfully.

To TREAT and all the volunteers: Your wildlife corridors are water quality corridors too. Thank you for your vision and persistence.
Cheers Kevin

📸 Aerial images: Peterson Creek upper catchment, 8 March 2026

08/03/2026

The shape of this waterfall is the shape of a lava flow.
1.24 million years ago, Windy Hill volcano — the ridge now carrying the wind farm east of Ravenshoe — sent lava 25 kilometres down this valley. The river was entombed. When it found its way back, it spread across the flat upper surface of the lowermost flow and went over the edge all at once.
That's why Millstream Falls is wide. Not volume. Geometry.
The vertical columns in the gorge walls are the same lava, read differently — the record of how basalt contracts as it cools, cracking downward in a repeating pattern. Same physics as a beehive. Same answer, every time, everywhere in the world.
The landscape doesn't change. Your ability to read it does.

📍 Millstream Falls National Park · Jirrbal Country · Ravenshoe, Atherton Tablelands
🌋 Windy Hill Volcano · dated 1.24 Ma · Whitehead et al. 2007
✈️ Mavic 4 Pro · kevinexplores.com.au

07/03/2026

07/03/2026

Millstream Falls isn't new to me. I've shot it before — drone footage, stills, the usual passes. I thought I had it.

Then I went back to the literature.

Specifically, to the work of JCU and ANU geologists who dated the basalt flows here to 1.24 million years, and to Warwick Willmott's careful reading of what those flows actually mean for the landscape you can see. I went back to the falls this morning with that knowledge in my head and a different set of questions.

Same place. Completely different shoot.

That's the thing about geological interpretation. The landscape doesn't change. Your ability to read it does. And once you start reading it, the familiar becomes extraordinary.

Here's what the rock is saying.

The hill you can see from Ravenshoe — the broad, gently sloping ridge now occupied by the wind farm east of town — is Windy Hill volcano. It doesn't look like a volcano because it isn't one anymore. The summit has collapsed. What remains is the eroded flanks of a shield volcano that geologists from James Cook University and the Australian National University dated, from samples collected right here at Millstream Falls, at 1.24 million years old. Two samples. Widely separated locations. Same answer. That's not an estimate — that's a date stamped into the rock by physics.

From Windy Hill, lava poured more than 25 kilometres south and southwest, filling an old valley of the Millstream River. The river, suddenly entombed, had to find a new way. It worked along the margins between the fresh black basalt and the older surrounding rocks — rhyolite, in this case, from a completely different volcanic episode nearly 300 million years older. Where the boundary was exploitable, the river followed it. Where it wasn't, the river cut directly into the basalt itself. That patient negotiation between water and rock over a million years is what produced this gorge.

The falls are a direct expression of the lava's geometry.
The basalt flows cooled from the outside in. As they solidified, they contracted — and that contraction drove fractures downward through the rock in a repeating pattern. Hexagonal columns, mostly, though rectangles and irregular polygons appear too. The physics is the same as a beehive, the same as dried mud. The result here is those columns in the lower cliff faces — a permanent record of how the rock was made, written into the gorge wall at full scale.

The upper surfaces of these flows stayed horizontal — flat, level, essentially as the lava left them. That geometry is why the falls are so wide. The river reaches that shelf, finds no weakness to exploit, and spreads sideways across the full width before going over the edge all at once. The shape of the waterfall is the shape of the lava flow.

Geologist Warwick Willmott put the connection plainly: the falls plunge in a wide curtain over the horizontal lowermost lava flow, showing how geology can directly shape the appearance of streams and falls. It's not poetry. It's mechanics. But the result is extraordinary.

The long exposure in this set shows what I mean — the silked water breaking over the column tops, geology and hydrology in a single frame.

The literature tells me that from sufficient altitude the boundary between the basalt and the rhyolite is readable as two distinct vegetation types — denser forest on the dark soils, open eucalypt woodland on the pale — but that's a story for another shoot, with better positioning and the right season.

This volcanic landscape was also witnessed.

The Atherton Basalt Province didn't finish its activity before people arrived. Research published in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences confirms that volcanic eruptions in this region continued well into the Holocene — within the last 10,000 years, and possibly much more recently. The crater lakes you can visit today — Barrine, Eacham, Euramoo — formed within human memory. Aboriginal oral history recorded by linguist R.M.W. Dixon in 1972 includes a detailed account of the formation of those lakes that Dixon described as a plausible description of a volcanic eruption. The storyteller noted that the country around the lakes was open scrub at the time — a detail later confirmed by pollen analysis, which showed the present rainforest to be less than 7,600 years old. People watched this landscape being made. Their knowledge of it is older than the forest that now surrounds it.

The Jirrbal people as the Traditional Owners of the country on which these images were taken. This landscape carries their knowledge and their history alongside the geological record — and as these images show, the two are inseparable.

The Google Earth image in this set shows the spatial relationship — Windy Hill to the east of Ravenshoe, the flow path running south and southwest, Millstream Falls sitting at the end of the line. Twenty-five kilometres from source to falls, written in rock.
If you want to understand this country — really understand it — start with the rock. Everything else follows.

If you are interested in information like this, please follow me or subscribe on my website.

Cheers
Kevin
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Millstream Falls National Park · Ravenshoe · Atherton Tablelands

Kennedy Highway, 3km west of Ravenshoe
Aerial footage: Mavic 4 Pro

Geological sources: Willmott, W.F. — Rocks and Landscapes of the National Parks of North Queensland, Geoscience Australia; Whitehead et al. (2007) — Temporal development of the Atherton Basalt Province, Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 54:5.

27/02/2026

Awakening at Atherton and Wongabel This Morning

What a morning to be airborne over the Atherton Tablelands. This sequence of images captures the drama of a fog inversion event that transformed the volcanic landscape of Hallorans Hill and the Wongabel district into something truly otherworldly.

It was a reminder that the Atherton Tablelands is not just a beautiful place — it is a place whose beauty is explained by its geology. Every foggy valley, every symmetrical green cone, every red-soil paddock is the direct expression of volcanic processes that shaped this landscape over the last two million years.

Our landscapes tell stories when seen from above. Curiosity drives me to find them — follow me and I'll share what I discover.

Cheers
Kevin

PS - A note on the geology

Hallorans Hill is classified by Whitehead et al. as a shield volcano — K-Ar dated at 2.05 million years — with a radius of approximately 1,400 metres and relief of 70 metres above its surrounds. Atherton town sits on its flanks. The Wongabel 1 cinder cone, visible in several of these images, is dramatically younger — uranium-thorium dating places it at just 80,000 to 110,000 years old, making it one of the most recent volcanic eruptions in the province. Together they illustrate the broader story of the Atherton Basalt Province: early, voluminous shield-building eruptions giving way, over the last million years, to smaller, more explosive cinder cone activity. The rich red-brown basaltic soils that make this landscape so agriculturally productive are the direct legacy of both.

(Source: Whitehead et al., 2007, Temporal development of the Atherton Basalt Province, Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, 54:5, 691–709)

22/02/2026

Volcanism and the Barron River — What the Landscape Remembers

The Barron River has an unlikely birth. It begins as seepage in rainforest directly beneath a communications tower, drops into cleared farming country running alongside the largest shield volcano on the Atherton Tablelands, then crosses under the Kennedy Highway to enter Mount Hypipamee National Park — site of one of the most violent volcanic events in the region's recent geological history. That short stretch of river traverses millions of years of geological story.

The Pre-Volcanic Landscape

Before volcanism began roughly 7 million years ago, the Tablelands were a far more dissected landscape — a complex of valleys and ridgelines carved into ancient metamorphic and granite basement rocks now over 400 million years old. The Barron existed, but the catchment was shaped very differently. Some tributaries we now consider part of the Barron system almost certainly drained northwest toward the Gulf of Carpentaria via the Mitchell River catchment. The Barron we know today is substantially a product of volcanic and tectonic rearrangement — the river has been rebuilt by fire.

The Great Valley-Filling

The defining geological event for the modern Barron catchment was the eruption of the Malanda shield volcano between about 3.4 and 3 million years ago. It was — and remains — the largest volcanic centre in the Atherton Basalt Province, with a radius of 7 kilometres and flows that reached as far as Mena Creek, 60 kilometres to the southeast. Its lava did not flow over a flat surface. It exploited the lowest ground, pouring into and filling the pre-existing valley network, burying the old drainage under basalt hundreds of metres thick in places. What had been a dissected landscape of valleys and ridges became the relatively flat, smoother contoured tableland surface we recognise today.

A River Pushed to the Margins

The aerial image looking north tells this story in a way that ground level cannot. The Malanda volcano occupies the right side of the frame — not as a dramatic cone, but as something three million years of tropical erosion has transformed into a complex of rainforest-draped ridges and deeply incised valleys, the original lava surface long since carved by streams into the terrain you see here. To the left, and out of shot but evident in the topographic map, is the older basement country of the Herberton Range — metamorphic and granite rocks far more ancient than the basalt. Headed north, the Kennedy Highway runs a ridgeline that straddles a geological boundary that most travellers don't know exists.

Read alongside the map, the image reveals something subtler. The Barron River runs not across the volcanic surface but along its western edge — displaced to the foothills of the older ranges because the Malanda volcano's lava flows claimed the central tableland. The river didn't vanish under the basalt. It was likely pushed aside, and it has been running along that displaced course ever since.

Disruption by Diatreme

Dinner Falls — a small but perfectly formed waterfall in the vicinity of the Barron's headwaters — sits immediately adjacent to the Hypipamee diatreme, a vertical-walled crater blasted through solid rock by a single violent gas explosion. Diatreme and maar eruptions in the province are among its most recent events, occurring well within the timeframe of human occupation of the Tablelands. Aboriginal oral traditions recorded by researchers describe the formation of the crater lakes in terms that one linguist called a plausible description of a volcanic eruption — the storyteller noting in 1964 that the country around the lakes was open scrub at the time of the events described, before pollen analysis later confirmed the surrounding rainforest to be less than 7,600 years old. The Barron is born in country that was geologically explosive within living memory of the people who have called this landscape home for tens of thousands of years.

What We Don't Yet Know

The precise relationship between individual lava flows and the reshaping of the Barron catchment remains poorly understood. The most rigorous dating of the volcanic centres — Whitehead et al. (2007) in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences — focuses on the timing and chemistry of eruptions rather than their hydrological consequences. How the Malanda volcano's flows redirected what are now Barron tributaries is a question the landscape preserves but science has not yet answered.

That is reason enough to keep looking.

Cheers
Kevin

20/02/2026

A Catchment Story: The River Mareeba Crosses But Rarely Sees

Every day, vehicles cross the Barron River on Mareeba's Kennedy Highway bridge or via Anzac Avenue. A fleeting glimpse of water, trees, then it's gone.

But from above, a different story emerges. The aerial view reveals a riparian corridor threading through the heart of town. Those trees resolve into a diverse canopy – mature figs, eucalypts and paperbarks creating a continuous wildlife corridor.

From this perspective, you can see what the bridge crossing hides.

The story, however, started much earlier.

Mareeba means "meeting of the waters" – the Barron River and Granite Creek joining forces to continue their descent toward the coast.

For thousands of years, this confluence made strategic sense. Rivers as highways, meeting points, resource zones. The Djabugay and Muluridji peoples understood this landscape through the lens of connection – how water links places, carries information, creates corridors through country.

European settlement recognised the same logic, different language. Cobb & Co coach stop, railway station, supply hub. The river became "resource" rather than "relationship," but the geographic truth remained: this is where things meet.

During the wet, this corridor tells upstream stories. Every particle of sediment suspended in that brown water has traveled from the tablelands. The changing colour and swirling patterns signal where it's been raining, what land it's crossed, the journey from volcanic soils through granite country and ultimately to the reef.

The Esplanade walking track threads along the western bank – usually a place for quiet walks, for locals who know how to find it. From the air, you can see what they experience: the scale of the canopy overhead, the swimming holes at river bends, the peaceful separation from urban noise just meters away.

This is also the town's water supply corridor, though few think of it that way anymore. Since Tinaroo Dam was built in 1958, seasonal extremes have become steady flow, the river's role shifting from dramatic seasonal event to reliable resource. The wet season reminds us: this is still a dynamic system, still connected to everything upstream.

Mareeba is one of the few towns actually situated on the Barron River – not just near it, on it. The main stem flows right through town, creating opportunities most riverside communities would treasure.

The Esplanade represents our contemporary "meeting place" use – morning walkers, afternoon strollers, locals who've found the access points. It's quiet, understated, functioning as refuge, as connection to something not-urban right in the middle of urban.

Yet the question remains: what does "meeting place" mean for contemporary Mareeba? The confluence still functions geologically, ecologically, hydrologically. The corridor still offers space for human and non-human communities to intersect with water. But we've marginalised it, made it peripheral rather than central – not activated like town centres or sports fields, but present nonetheless.

Other regional towns position their rivers as identity-makers, gathering points, defining features. Mareeba is actually situated ON the Barron River – a rarity in the catchment – yet relatively few residents could tell you where to access it or what makes it significant.

The wet season creates visibility. The high flows, the dramatic colour, the reminder that this system connects to everywhere upstream and downstream.

Discover, or rediscover, your river. The meeting place is still there, still functioning, still waiting.

Cheers,
Kevin