Yesterday, the day after Bobby Jindal’s woefully inadequate “response to the Presidential Address,” we decided to go visit a volcano to see how our tax dollars are being spent in research. This is one of the things Jindal derided in his prepared remarks.
Activity Summary for past 24 hours: The ongoing DI event began the inflation phase yesterday, which continues this morning. Sulfur dioxide emission rates remain elevated from the Halema`uma`u vent. Sulfur dioxide emissions continue to be elevated from the Pu`u `O`o vent. Lava from east rift zone vents appears to have resumed flow through tubes to the ocean.
Past 24 hours at Kilauea summit: Overnight, no glow was observed from the vent. A white plume is moving low and southwest over the Ka`u Desert this morning.
Sulfur dioxide emission rates remain elevated and variable. The high value noted in yesterday’s report was due to a sensor problem, so we note the most recent reliable value of 600 tonnes/day on February 13, compared to the 2003-2007 average rate of 140 tonnes/day.
Seismic tremor levels remain elevated. Earthquake activity has been generally low: located earthquakes include two beneath the summit, three beneath the south flank and two off of the south coast. The number of RB2S2BL earthquakes is within background values.
The network of tiltmeters within the caldera recorded the onset of DI inflation at about 10:15 am yesterday, and inflation continues this morning. The GPS network (less sensitive than the tiltmeter network) recorded about 1.5 cm of contraction across the caldera over the past 3 months with little contraction since mid-January.
When we arrived at the National Park entrance yesterday, we were greeted by a friendly ranger and given brochures and things. Our usual habit is to buy a yearly National Park Pass now and then because it generally turns out that we can use it several times within the year, and also we feel pretty strongly about supporting the National Parks when we can.
We stopped off at the Visitors Center, which was packed with the usual displays, racks of DVDs, books, gifts, and tourists just off the bus asking questions. As a fairly frequent museum patron, I couldn’t help but notice that the scientific displays were looking pretty worn, although they were quiet serviceable. They had the chunks of lava that you could touch and the free-standing and wall-mounted displays, but nothing looked “new” except for a couple of flat-screen displays.
Since we were hungry, we went for the buffet lunch at Volcano House, the official park lodge.
This is a building that’s definitely seen better days, as it shows the signs of a truly horrific 70’s remodel job overlaid on the bones of a building that had been rebuilt so many times that it’s lost all sense of character, time, or place. There’s a nice porte-cochere but the lobby is swathed in bad rec-room paneling, there’s a nice fireplace/seating area with beautiful koa-wood rockers and nice art, but an extremely tacky dining room. And so on – the interpretive display that was on the wall opposite the ugly and inconvenient front desk consisted of some former staffer’s snapshots Scotch-taped to mounting boards, with captions in shaky calligraphy directly on the mounting board. An amateur effort, gallantly done because there was probably no money in the budget after the horrible remodel to put up attractive, professionally produced photographic displays.
Lunch (an overpriced mishmosh of luau food in steam tables except for the lack of poi and haupia) was soon dispensed with; the dining room has an amazing view of the main Kilauea caldera and the Halema’uma’u inner caldera, complete with steaming, vaporous vent. We knew from the displays and daily report that some roads were closed, so we set off to see what could be seen.
Our first stop was the Jaggar Museum, which acts as a scientific visitors center on the rim of the caldera. More tired looking displays inside, being looked over by a lot of tourists from Japan and the US. We happened upon a ranger talk that was just starting, so we went outside to hear a pretty good overview of what was currently happening, what trends researchers were noticing over time, and some personal observations by a female ranger who had been giving talks there for 20 years. She was a pistol; a small, crinkly-eyed woman whose years in the sun and wind gave her a suitably credible appearance. She had an armful of colorful illustrations that she’d probably put together on her own time, out of pocket, to illustrate the legends, lore, and history of the Kilauea volcano and eruptions. Again, not a lot of government funds appeared to be wasted.
Most of the money appears to be going to the science; we didn’t visit the official science station, of course, but I’d be willing to bet that the instruments they’re using were pretty decent… though probably they could use some funding to improve those.
As it was an intermittently misty day, I regret that I didn’t take any pictures of the caldera. I should have done that when we first got up to Volcano House, before the mist came overhead and made photography a dodgy business (you never know when that vapor stuff coming at you is water mist, or “vog,” and sometimes the sulfur dioxide or “acid rain” type content can be bad for electronics and lenses, according to some of the brochures and displays we saw.
We found that indeed the famous crater rim drive that circles the caldera was closed on the far side, due to the prodigious amounts of sulfurous vapor the mountain was pumping out. There were frequent warning signs and people with breathing problems were discouraged from driving through the stuff, and in fact the instructions in the brochure said to set the AC in the car to “recirculate” if we had to pass through any drifting vapor.
So we went around to the other side where the “Chain of Craters” road could be accessed; this is the one that goes down to the sea and used to run along the coast and out of the park before it was covered over by a big lava flow a few years back. We’d been down there on our last visit and decided to see what might have changed.
Well, it’s a lunar landscape in some areas. I did take some pictures down there of a very weird, low-lying rainbow that was sitting in front of the vapor cloud (there was also heavy mist coming down from the “wet” side that kept blowing over our way). We went to the end, parked, and walked up the last stretch of closed road, which looked much as it did 5 or more years ago on our last visit. At that time, lava was flowing only about a couple of miles from the end of the road, but it’s shifted farther to the west since then, and it was about 7 miles away across lumpy, trackless piles of pahoe’oe and a’a lava (the first kind is the smooth, ropy stuff and the second is the sharp, broken looking sort). There were trail markers stuck to the lava, little plastic reflectors for people using flashlights after dark, but we didn’t venture far because it was late in the afternooon already.
We’re kind of hoping to return tomorrow and go around to the other side to try to see the steam plume where the lava enters the ocean; it’s kind of tricky to actually see the lava unless it’s around sunset or after dark. We have today and tomorrow left in the Islands and return home Saturday afternoon.
And there are a number of really, really good reasons why volcano monitoring matters; aside from some of the other examples I’ve seen like tsunami and earthquake warnings, there are a number of American cities near volcanoes. Gov. Jindal might not feel the money was unjustified if he were the chief executive of California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii… or Alaska.
Would he rather stint on hurricane research? No? Then he should do his homework next time before babbling condescendingly as if to a nation of simpletons.
