Encompassing Insight
Sterna Striata, the White Fronted Tern or the Kahawai Bird can be found along New Zealand’s entire coastline, where they thrive at the interface of the onshore-offshore domains. These efficient coastal Terns have New Zealand covered, fishing abundant SW Pacific waters, and nesting along sandy coastal plains, stony braided river banks and brackish estuaries.
Like our namesake, Sterna Ltd innately understands New Zealand’s surrounding offshore domain. While Sterna Striata is advantaged by precision diving techniques to efficiently fish, Sterna Ltd dives jointly into a banquet of open-file data, and key outstanding research questions concerning New Zealand’s untapped sedimentary basin endowment.
Similarly to Sterna Striata, while we know what surrounds New Zealand, we’re keenly aware that all offshore provinces aren’t created equal. Today, the strength of New Zealand’s prospective basin opportunities are reflected by legacy data coverage, historic scientific outputs, and a proximity to infrastructure.
From local research experience, we know what’s missing, and which questions to ask. We’ve optimised research objectives according to open-file data availability, honing our sights on 3 key sedimentary basins:
What We Do
-
We define the critical uncertainties, design the technical strategy, and structure programmes around clear decision-making objectives.
-
We build geological, petrophysical, and physical-property models to test scenarios and guide survey design before any data is acquired.
-
We manage the specification, acquisition, processing, and inversion of geophysical data through best-in-class specialist contractors.
-
We interpret and integrate new data into seismic and basin frameworks to deliver coherent, decision-grade regional understanding.
Our Background
Sterna is lead by company principal Dr Michael Macnaughtan, who has worked extensively on one of New Zealand’s most exciting frontier basins, the offshore Pegasus Basin. With early academic exposure to seismic reflection-based investigation of the Northland Basin, Michael then undertook more than 6 years of University of Auckland Masters-, and Doctoral-level study on the geologically dynamic Pegasus Basin.
Michael’s published insights into the Pegasus Basin reveal a previously unrealised dimension to its’ ancient Gondwana-era geologic naissance and subsequent evolution, which have direct implications on hydrocarbon prospectivity and shallow carbon cycling over a 100 million year period. His contribution to the geologic understanding of the offshore Pegasus Basin extends into areas of deep-to-shallow gas cycling, ancient magmatism, and subsurface methane hydrate reorganisation habits.
Michael has enjoyed wide exposure to academic science, taking part in 2 internationally significant research voyages (pictured) aboard the RV Tangaroa, New Zealand’s premier scientific vessel. Further, Michael has blended his geoscientific curiosity with an ambition to pursue applied science in energy, most-recently expressed by his presentation of novel research to IMAGE25 conference attendees in Houston.
His spirit for applied geoscience developed alongside an ambition to see the return of local industry capacity, particularly through the development of endogenous resources at a time where volatility in commodity markets presents a real risk to the security of an import-dependent nation. As such, Michael forewent multiple international roles as an exploration geoscientist to pursue local opportunities, aiming to help reinvigorate both applied science, and energy industry activity in New Zealand primarily through Sterna Ltd.
A key aspect of Sterna Ltd is the promotion and support of New Zealand’s open-file data sharing model. Having built a collaborative academic career directly supported by shared open-file energy industry data, Michael has experienced first-hand the power of synergy between academia, the public sector and the energy industry.
From open-file data sharing, novel scientific insights concurrently benefit the international geoscientific community and support applied science-based efforts of the energy industry, domestically and abroad.
TAN1808 Hikurangi Gas Hydrate Research Cruise (2/10/18)
TAN2006 Chatham Rise Research Cruise
Recent Publications
Macnaughtan, M. T., Strachan, L. J., & Pecher, I. A. (2026). The Pegasus Basin Hydrothermal Field – Latest Mesozoic magmatic activity under the northwestern Chatham Rise, New Zealand. Marine Geology. (In review).
