Life on the Rocks
Category: Mauna Loa
Land of Fogbows
The Saddle is the land of fogbows, they inhabit nearly every morning fog…
Mauna Kea
End of the Road
A number of roads I once drove have been claimed by volcanoes over the years.
Crater Rim Drive literally collapsed into Kilauea Caldera, the road, viewpoints, trailheads… All gone. Highway 132, Pohoiki road, Kopoho Road, all buried during the 2018 eruption. Sections of Highway 130 near Kalapana, slowly covered by the Puʻu Oʻo eruptions flowing to the sea.
And the Mauna Loa access road, cut by the 2022 Mauna Loa eruption.
How many times did I travel this road? Quite a few… Trips up to set up my own telescope near the NOAA research station. Contracting work at the NOAA station in the wake of the pandemic. A couple trips up just to enjoy the scenery or do a little photography.
Then an eruption, the first eruption of Mauna Loa in near four decades. The lava flows cut the road in two places.
I had not been up to where the lava crossed the road since the eruption. That was until until this last weekend. I finally got up there… No reason, just enjoying the mauna on a pretty Sunday morning. I parked down below and rode the bike the last few miles up to the lava flow.
As expected the road just vanishes under the lava. An impressive pile of aʻa clinkers covers the road twenty feet deep. Three years later I am rather surprised the road has not been re-cut into the observatory.
Here it is, lava across the road, power lines dangling, as far as you can go unless you are willing to abuse yourself crossing 300 yards of jagged aʻa. I sent the drone for a look.
Is it over already?
The question of the week… Is it over?
Eruptive activity began to wane at the end of last week,with the lava fountains diminishing, then disappearing over the weekend. Views in the webcams showed a steady decrease in activity at fissure 3 over the course of several days.
At this point no lava appears to be emerging onto the surface, with only a few dribbles left in the lava flow to be seen as minor glows across the flank of the mauna.
Oddly Kilauea, after erupting continuously for over a year seems also to have paused. There is no longer any visible lava or even a glow within the Halemauʻmauʻu crater.
Continue reading “Is it over already?”Mauna Loa Awakens
On the way home in the eve the red glow dominates the horizon. Going to work the next morning it is the plume on the skyline. The eruption is ever present.
When moving to the island fifteen years ago I had looked at the mauna and thought to myself… One day you will erupt, will it be during my time on the island? This though has occured to me many times in the intervening years… When hiking the lava flows in the saddle, when driving up and down Mauna Kea to work looking across at the many flows streaking the flanks of Mauna Loa. How many times have I looked up and wondered when? One day.
That day was Sunday, November 27th, 2022.
Continue reading “Mauna Loa Awakens”Mauna Loa Awakens
I am not certain what woke me up at one AM, but I was awake. Before going back to sleep I decided to check the satellite photos to see if I might get some telescope time before dawn. But what I found online had me totally awake and grabbing a couple batteries for the camera.
Mauna Loa has awoken.
I was soon driving out from the house to a point above the village with a clear view of the mauna. The whole southern sky an angry red over the village as I drove. I did not have to drive far, just a couple minutes from the house where you can find a clear view. Pulling off I set up the camera and shot.
I was not the only one out, half a dozen cars could be seen stopped along Waikoloa Road to view the eruption. The whole mauna is lit up red and it looks like the west flank is erupting, not just the caldera as Civil Defense currently insists. Just the clouds lit up on that side?
Life is intertesting.
Update: By dawn much of the caldera has flooded with lava. Scale is hard to see in the photos, you have to recall that the caldera is almost two miles across and three miles from end to end.
Update 9:11am: The eruption has already migrated to a series of fissures on the northeast flank. The typical Mauna Loa eruption script is a summit caldera eruption followed by a flank eruption a few days, or a few weeks later. We have just seen that happen in a few hours.
I am including a couple photos here taken by a co-worker as she commuted across the saddle this morning at dawn. You can already see the lava flows making their way into the saddle…
This is a Bit Concerning
Earthquake activity is on a bit of an uptick around here. While the mag 3.9 that woke us up a few nights ago was probably just a settling event under Mauna Kea, much of the remaining activity is under Mauna Loa. This includes a 3.7 magnitude event last night, part of an ongoing swarm under the long mountian.
Mauna Loa’s activity has remained elevated for some weeks now. There are two swarm centers. One directly under the caldera, but more interestingly a persistent swarm under the northwest flank a few kilometers away.
All of this has the island buzzing with concern. On social media, in the local papers, Mauna Loa is the subject of much speculation. The official line is that no eruption is imminent, but officials are quick to remind residents to monitor local emergency channels and have an evaculation plan at the ready.
Continue reading “This is a Bit Concerning”Mauna Loa Concerns
Like most armchair volcanologists on this island I have been monitoring Mauna Loa more closely lately. The deformation graphs in particular have been? Interesting. I have even gone so far as predicting that we will not get through the year without a Mauna Loa eruption.
The area of concern has been the western rift zone, exhibiting steady and shallow seismic activity for the last several years. More concerning is the rate of inflation shown in the GPS data, This seems to have doubled in rate around last October.
Then comes today.
An intense seismic swarm is currently occurring beneath the NW flank. Still fairly deep. a few kilometers below the surface, but getting shallower. Magma is definitely moving, a sizable mass moving upwards and emplacing itself higher in the volcano.
This may come to nothing in the near term. Like many seismic swarms it may stop. Just part of the process towards a future eruption some years from now, or never. Or we may be seeing the first step in a new eruption. I will hold to my prediction of an eruption sometime in 2021.
Sit back and watch.
Mauna Road
Two missions up into the saddle this week to go comet watching. Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE is rising in the northeast, blocked from view at home by the mauna, need to drive up to where I can see it.
With the comet as an excuse to get out well before dawn I may as well add a few secondary missions to the plan…
Make sure the drone batteries are charged for a few flights to photograph the saddle scenery at sunrise. The lava fields are spectacular at sunrise, one of my favorite places on the island.
The next mission is to photograph pueo along old Saddle Road. I tried two times, both times not a single bird to be seen. Where are the owls?
In any case a couple memorable trips into the dawn.
