Te Tai Poutini West Coast is a very different landscape compared to North Canterbury and the Canterbury Plains, east of the Southern Alps. The geology is much older, often highly deformed, and contains many slices of landmasses known as terranes - think of them as separate blocks coming together from different locations on the globe with their own separate histories, sutured togther by plutonic intrusions and large faults. The West Coast is a bit of a Frankenstein! This makes for an amazing variety of landscapes futher shaped by tectonics, glaciations and rivers.