Hawai’i is a marvellous place for a seismograph. There is something to see every day. HVO has been at the forefront of this, and had as many as 7 seismometers already in the 1940’s.Their network has been expanding ever since. The instruments are located mostly in the main areas of activity (i.e. Kilauea and its…
The activity in Kilauea in the last year has been, A LOT. Not much may have happened on the surface, but underground the developments have been many, including dike intrusions, changing focuses of inflation, and seismic crises. One year has seen a shift from a rapidly inflating Mauna Loa to an overactive Kilauea. It has…
An eruption has started at the summit of Mauna Loa. It has been a long wait! The inflation over the past month was notable, though not exceptional, but it was the drip that made the volcanic bucket overflow. We now need to see what happens. Commonly, eruptions migrate down the rift zone, in this case…
We continue where we left in the previous article. Last time we were looking at the eruptions of Mauna Loa in 1852, 1855-56, and 1859. These three large, closely spaced eruptions took place in the Northeast Rift Zone (NERZ) and north flank of the volcano. The next major flank eruption would happen in 1868. …
There has been much talk about Mauna Loa lately. Reason for this is that the earthquake levels have become increasingly elevated in past years, and even more so within the past few months, with some alarming episodes of earthquake activity at the summit. We’ve had two strong swarms coupled with rapid inflation of the caldera,…
Here is the third part of my Kilauea series that was promised, a bit more delayed than I would have wished though. Many things have happened at Kilauea since the previous part. A sill intrusion took place in the Upper Southwest Rift in August, then on September 29, about a month after the sill, lava…
In my previous article, here, I discussed how Kilauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes are connected to each other through the Pahala Swarm. Now I have to deal with a confrontation of theories that is inevitable. There is a classical model of how Hawaii works. It is all about the mantle plume. The classical view establishes…
Each volcano is an expression of a magma architectural construction, a great sculpture of chambers, pipes and sills, as intricate as an ant colony, or rather like the roots of a plant. This is all hidden away from our view, under kilometres or tens of kilometres of rock that makes it impossible for us to…
The expression became famous because of Isaac Newton. Never one to ignore praise, in typical English fashion he expressed his self-assured superiority in a self-effacing way: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants“. This was written in a letter to Robert Hooke, himself both an intellectual giant and…
Have you ever wondered about which is the tallest active volcano on the planet? It sounds like a fairly straightforward question. But, as with all simple questions it quickly turns into a quagmire of definitions. The first of the definitions starts out in linguistics, and that is what is the definition of “active”. It turns…