About 20 or 15 million years ago something new happened on Banks Peninsular. The earth deep down below the area began to melt.
Huge quanitities of molten rock were violently forced up to the surface. Red hot lava spewed out unannounced to a new land that had never experienced anything like it before. The age of the Akaor volcanoes had arrived.
For the next 9 million years the peninsular was the scene of fantastic earth-building volcanic activity.
The molten rock first burst out at Governors Bay, on the edge of what is now Lyttleton Harbour. The lava violently surged up through a number of fissures and vents in the ground around the bay.
This new molten rock flowed over and covered an irregular surface of earlier rocks: Charteris Bay Sandstone and the much older Torlesse rocks
As more and more molten rock erupted from below a classic volcanoe began to form and in time became one of the two main volcanoes on the peninsular, the mighty Lyttelton Volcano.
You can see evidence of this amazing event on the beach between the modern Port of Lyttleton and Governors Bay. The outcrops of grey rocks that you see these ancient lavas. At places they include fragments of the earlier Charteris Bay Sandstone, torn out of the earth as the molten new-comer musclled its way to the surface.
Another remnant of these first volcanoes are rhyolite domes and lava flows on Mansons and Potts peninsulas, on Quail Island.