Mount Taranaki

Mount Taranaki (), officially Taranaki Maunga and also known as Mount Egmont, is a dormant stratovolcano in the Taranaki region on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island. At , it is the second highest mountain in the North Island, after Mount Ruapehu. It has a secondary cone, Fanthams Peak (), , on its south side.

thumb|right|From [[New Plymouth]]

thumb|Aerial view of Mount Taranaki 2015

thumb|Mount Taranaki viewed from [[Inglewood, New Zealand|Inglewood, 1896]]

thumb|NASA satellite photo of Taranaki. The forested area matches the national park boundary fairly closely.

Name

The name Taranaki is from the Māori language. The mountain was named after Rua Taranaki, the first ancestor of the iwi (tribe) called Taranaki, one of several iwi in the region. The Māori word tara means mountain peak, and naki may come from ngaki, meaning "clear of vegetation." It was also named ("ice mountain") and ("hill of Naki") by iwi who lived in the region in "ancient times".

Captain Cook named it Mount Egmont on 11 January 1770 after John Perceval, 2nd Earl of Egmont, a former First Lord of the Admiralty who had supported the concept of an oceanic search for Terra Australis Incognita. Cook described it as "of a prodigious height and its top cover'd with everlasting snow," surrounded by a "flat country ... which afforded a very good aspect, being clothed with wood and verdure".

When the French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne saw the mountain on 25 March 1772 he named it . He was unaware of Cook's earlier visit.

It appeared as Mount Egmont on maps until 29 May 1986, when the name officially became "Mount Taranaki or Mount Egmont" following a decision by the Minister of Lands, Koro Wētere. The Egmont name no longer applies to the national park that surrounds the peak, but some geologists still refer to the peak as the Egmont Volcano.

As part of the Treaty of Waitangi settlement with Ngā Iwi o Taranaki, a group of tribes in the region, the mountain was officially renamed Taranaki Maunga. The settlement was initialled on 31 March 2023, The official name changed to Taranaki Maunga on 1 April 2025.

Some iwi in the region had referred to the mountain as Taranaki Mounga rather than Taranaki Maunga, per the local Māori dialect.

Geology

Mount Taranaki is situated in the sedimentary Taranaki Basin and is part of the Taranaki Volcanic Lineament which has had a north to south migration over the last 1.75 million years. Under the volcano itself there is high heat flow with only about crustal thickness although this rapidly normalises for continental crust to east of the volcano and to the west.

The oldest volcanic remnants consist of a series of lava plugs: Paritutu Rock (156 metres), which forms part of New Plymouth's harbour, and the Sugar Loaf Islands close offshore. These have been dated at 1.75 million years.

On the coast, 15 kilometres southwest of New Plymouth is the Kaitake Range (682 metres), last active over 500,000 years ago. Between 1755 and 1800, an eruption sent a pyroclastic flow down the mountain's northeast flanks, and a moderate ash eruption occurred about 1755, of the size of Ruapehu's activity in 1995/1996. The last major eruption occurred around 1655. Recent research has shown that over the last 9,000 years minor eruptions have occurred roughly every 90 years on average, with major eruptions every 500 years. Some of these eruptions may have occurred with very brief warning, of only days or less. However in the Holocene there have been at least 138 eruptions,

! class="unsortable" width=95px | Years before 1950 (BP)

! width=70px | VEI

| align="center"|<span style="display:none">1790</span> ± 10