Clarence River (New Zealand)

The Clarence River system.

A view over the river mouth near Kaikoura.

Clarence River is located on South Island of New Zealand. It is 160 kilometres long.

For its first 50 kilometres, the river runs in a generally southeastern direction. It then turns northeast, running down a long straight valley between the Inland and Seaward Kaikoura Ranges. At the end of the Seaward Kaikouras, the river meanders through undulating hill country before draining into the Pacific Ocean near the town of Clarence.

A large part of the river is within the boundaries of Molesworth Station.

Northern tributaries along the middle segment of Clarence River (e.g., Mead Stream, Dee Stream, Muzzle Stream) cut through an uplifted and rotated block of limestone and marl deposited from the late Cretaceous through the Paleocene and middle Eocene (75-45 million years ago). Exposures of this limestone -- the Amuri Limestone -- provide some of the most complete records for this time interval of Earth's history. They have provided important insights to our understanding of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 (ETM-2), and other Paleogene hyperthermal events.