Hundreds of Waterfalls Appear When It Rains at Milford Sound

If you travel to the southwest coast of New Zealand’s South Island, you will find a place where the weather completely controls the landscape.

This is Milford Sound. It is a massive, dark waterway surrounded by steep green cliffs that shoot straight up into the clouds. The most famous peak, Mitre Peak, rises more than 5,500 feet directly out of the water. But the wildest part of this landscape only happens when it rains. And it rains here a lot.

Carved By Massive Glaciers

Even though it is called a sound, geologists will tell you it is actually a fjord. The difference comes down to how it was made.

Millions of years ago, thick rivers of ice cut deep valleys into the hard rock of the mountains. When the last ice age ended, and the Earth warmed up, those glaciers melted. The ocean rushed in to fill the empty space. That is why the rock walls go straight down. They do not slope into a beach. They just drop thousands of feet straight to the bottom of the ocean floor.

The Wettest Place In New Zealand

Milford Sound gets hit with crazy weather. It sees about 22 feet of rain every single year. Most people try to avoid the rain on vacation, but here, the storms are the main event.

Because the cliffs are so steep and the rock is so hard, the water cannot soak into the ground. It has nowhere to go but down. So when a heavy rainstorm rolls in, hundreds of temporary waterfalls instantly appear along the cliff walls. You can watch massive sheets of water falling from thousands of feet up. The wind coming off the ocean gets so strong that it actually catches the water and blows some of the falls straight backward up the mountain. When the rain stops, most of those waterfalls disappear just as fast as they started.

A Dark Underwater World

All that rain does something really strange to the water itself.

When the heavy freshwater pours off the cliffs, it sits right on top of the heavier saltwater from the ocean. It creates a dark, tea-colored layer on the surface that blocks the sunlight from reaching the depths below. Because it is so dark, deep-sea creatures like black coral and rare fish live in very shallow water. They act like they are at the bottom of the sea, even though they are just a few feet below the surface.