Planetary Volcanology Workshop

6-12 August 2001

I participated in the PGG Planetary Volcanology Workshop on the Big Island of Hawai'i this year, and it was a fantastic learning experience. It was led by Scott Rowland with help from Peter Mouginis-Mark and Ronnie Torres, and they did a great job.

Monday was the day that everyone was arriving, and so other than a big dinner together, and walks through the My Island garden, there wasn't much going on.

Some pictures of the My Island Bed & Breakfast Inn where we stayed for the week. I must have been moving the camera for this first shot because everyone is blurry.
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Day 1 (Tuesday, 7 August)

Our first morning's hike took us through a forest of lava trees. Places where the lava flowed through a regular forest and the lava lapped up around the existing trunks. You can find tree molds like the one Jani is modeling, and even places where the remnants of the trees are still present.
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After that we hiked past some smallish old skylights on our way to Pu'u Huluhulu which has a great overlook of Mauna Ulu (which was our next destination).
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On our way to the summit, we passed a great lava channel that had some excellent drain-back features.
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The summit of Mauna Ulu was fun too.
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Then we started our hike down, which was to take the rest of the afternoon. In this first picture you can see the group heading down towards that collapse feature and the channel that runs into the distance. We followed this channel until it met up with the road.
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After meeting up with the vehicles, we drove down the road a bit, and hiked down some combination of Poliokeawe and Holai Palis (pali means cliff) with a 2000 foot elevation drop in a relatively short horizontal distance.
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After our exhausting first day, we also stopped at a Kilauea caldera overlook.
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Day2 (Wednesday, 8 August)

The next day we were headed towards South Point and Mauna Loa's SW rift zone. Our first roadside stop was to get a look at the Nínole hills in the distance which are believed to be erosional remnants of an ancient Mauna Loa shield phase.
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Our next stop was at a large a'a flow, which is probably about 10 meters high at this point. It had some large olivine crystals in it.
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We also stopped at Honu'apo harbor, an old pier, that has the "Mick Jagger" lava tube nearby and the communications cable to HUGO (Hawai'i Undersea Geo-Observatory), which monitors the Loihi seamount, running from it.
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This picture is from the 1868 flow that we stopped at.
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We took a long hike down a lava tube in the Pohue Bay flows just to the west of the Kahuku Pali west of South Point.
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Day3, (Thursday, 9 August)

The next morning was Cari's birthday, here she is putting her "It's my birthday" button on.
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We had been in and out of Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park for the past couple of days, but we finally got a chance that morning to go to the park visitor center and the Volcano museum , which had a great overlook of the caldera.
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Then we hiked around the southwest rift zone.
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And we then hiked back towards the caldera to get yet another view.
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We stopped at an area that people thought looked like Mars, so I took some shots. Just make the sky red behind Keith, and you could pretend that he's dying of asphyxiation in the low-gravity environment of the Martian surface.
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Then we went to a place where there was a lava pool for a while during the 1982 eruption.
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This is Keanakakoi Crater which had lava in it in 1974.
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We then crossed the road and took a look at a fissure from the 1974 eruption, and a place where the lava utilized a previously existing gully to flow down. You can see where it took a big turn and the "high-lava" mark is really low on the inside of the turn and really high on the outside of it.
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That afternoon we drove down to the end of Chain of Craters Rd. and set out on our journey to the active flows. The active flows were on the eastern side of the older flows from Pu'u O'o, and you could possibly have gotten there sooner by coming from the east. However, then we wouldn't have had the fun of hiking three hours each way across the other-worldly landscape of lava that was less than ten years old.
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At our last resting spot before we got to the flows, we could make out the steaming clouds caused by the ocean entry of lava from these flows. This, of course, made a nice rainbow as well.
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When we got close to the active flows, we could tell, there was a quite visible heat shimmer, and you could tell that the ambient temperature had gone up. We crossed over a relatively recent a'a flow, and hiked around hunting for the incadescent red glow of molten rock. We split up and a group of us hiked towards the Pali to try and fins some stuff. We were totally excited to see little hints of red in cracks on the lava surfaces that we were carefully moving across, but we didn't find anything. Then the group that had started searching seaward gave up a yell that they had found some active pahoehoe lava toes, and so we high-tailed it down there where we spent the rest of the afternoon/evening.
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Day 4 (Friday, 10 August)

The next morning we drove into Hilo, and headed for the Saddle Road. We stopped at Rainbow Falls. Apparently the river that feeds this waterfall essentially follows the boundary between the Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea lavas.
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Further up the road, we stopped at Kaumana Cave which is a large lava tube in the 1880-81 Mauna Loa flow.
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Before lunch we made it to where the road for the Mauna Kea observatories splits off from the Saddle Road, and where there is a hill composed of Mauna Kea lava surrounded by Mauna Loa lava.
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We stopped and got a goot overlook of the Maunda Kea lavas in the near field, and Kohala in the background.
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There was one layer in this flow that we stopped at along the road with huge olivine xenoliths in it.
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After a long day of geology, we headed to Hapuna for some time at the beach. While we were waiting for our dinner, I snapped a few pictures of the sunset and our bunch watching the sunset. (unfortunately, the reflective strips on Mike's shoes really screwed up the dynamic range of that last photo)
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Day 5 (Saturday, 11 August)

That morning, Brian broke the 12 pieces of french toast record at the B&B, unfortunately he felt that 13 was unlucky, so set the record at 14 pieces. This herculean effort took Brian about an hour of paced eating, but he managed to pull it off.
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That day was the mapping project day, and we hiked all over the Mauna Iki area ground-truthing the remote sensing data that we had. I thought that I had taken more photos, but I guess not.
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We managed to do the wrap-up Saturday night, and Sunday saw us attempting to sleep in for the first time in a week, and getting our stuff together to head to the airport.

It's really difficult to describe what a fantastic hands-on learning experience this workshop was, and I especially enjoyed the mapping project which was a really great example of what you can and can't tell from various kinds of remote sensing data.

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-Ross Beyer


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