Trouble in Paradise: awakening Mauna Loa

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…

Mauna Loa from 1852 to 1868 – part 1

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,…

Kilauea III. Rifts under Hawaii.

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…

Kilauea II: Roots of the Hawaiian Islands

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…

Kilauea I: Magma waves from the phantom rift

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 piggyback volcano

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…

The most erect of volcanoes?

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…

Kilauea – Slump or Slide?

As I have perused the internet in the last few days I have noticed that the “gargantuan landslide causing a mega-tsunami” meme is in full swing again, now in relation to Kilauea. Therefore, I think it is time to write a more laidback article about what is happening in that regard with Kilauea. But before…

Pēlā paha Mauna Loa

The world of volcanism is not about being equal. There are small volcanoes, there are big volcanoes and then there is Mauna Loa. And until someone actually proves that the Tamu Massif is one single volcano and not a Large Igneous Province or a multiple volcano area I will continue to refer to Mauna Loa…