MOUTERE AQUIFER
Moutere Waters is drawn from half a kilometre below the idealic rolling green hills of Moutere on the Northern Coast of New Zealand's South Island. Near the small town of Tasman and overlooking the Cook Strait, it is a place of remarkable natural beauty ringed by vast tracts of pristine wilderness which has for centuries held a secret deep below - the Moutere Aquifer.
The Moutere Aquifer is an underground water deposit of pristine glacial water from the last Ice Age locked for millennia deep below the Earth's surface under a largely impermeable layer of rock and clay keeping the water in a thoroughly pristine state of the highest purity. Long before Maori navigators had discovered New Zealand, the pristine waters of Moutere were held in vast glaciers. As these glaciers melted, as the Quaternary Ice age drew to a close, large volumes of precious and pristine glacial water seeped into the Pacific Ocean. While much of the ancient glacial water was lost, a geological fault allowed a small volume to drain and be filtered through the Moutere Gravels into the aquifer deep underground, where it has remained hidden for over 27,000 years.
The Moutere Aquifer may still be hidden if it were not for water shortages in the Upper Moutere thirty years ago. During this time local landowners began drilling wells in search of more reliable water supplies. As these wells sunk deeper and deeper the purity and chemistry of the water suddenly began to change and over a half a kilometre below the earth's surface one of the world's oldest fresh water reserves was discovered - the paleogroundwaters of the Moutere Acquifer.
The discovery of this pristine and ancient water deposit bought scientists from around the globe to study the Moutere Aquifer and it's glacial origins. In the time since many scientific papers have been published about the Moutere Aquifer, one of the few remaining fossil water deposits in the world. Today Moutere ancient glacial waters are now available, bottled direct from the aquifer by the Johnstone family, owners for over a century of the property from where Moutere Waters is sourced.
