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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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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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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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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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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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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