Valentine’s Day: True Lava

The Big Island is built out of five volcanoes, two of them still active: Mauna Loa and Kilauea. Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984, while Kilauea last erupted when I started typing this sentence. More accurately, it is been in an on-and-off eruptive state since early 1983, and although it wasn’t doing anything when we were here a year ago, it’s somewhat back in action now. Lava brings tourists, and it is precisely because of these irregular outbursts of varying magnitude that Hawaii Volcanoes National Park attracts over a million visitors a year. With proper precautions — rigorously enforced by the National Park Service — you can get a spectacular view without being parboiled (or, as happens once every year or two, falling into a crater).

The park is a two hour drive from our house, and the lava is of course best viewed at night, so rather than make an exhausting round trip we drove to Hilo (on the eastern, windward side of the island) and met up with our old friends Tom and Carole — he and I being old colleagues from my observatory days — who invited us to spend the night at their house.

We drove to the volcano at about 9:00 PM, passing through drizzly low-hanging clouds en route to the 4000 ft summit; the park is about 45 minutes from Hilo. There is a road, Crater Rim Drive, that, up until part of it was deemed unsafe after a major eruption a few years ago, used to encircle the 3-mile diameter summit caldera. Now it only goes about halfway around and dead-ends at each end. In the middle of the caldera is the locus of the current eruption: Halema’uma’u Crater, essentially a crater within a crater that is currently home to a lava lake several hundred feet deep. Up until about two years ago, Halema’uma’u was about 3000 feet across with sheer vertical walls. But the walls collapsed about three years ago in the last outburst, and the crater is now shallower but nearly twice as big.

We parked at a trailhead and, armed with flashlights, walked a mile over a now closed-off section of Crater Rim Drive to be treated to this sight, about a mile away from our perch:

The third photo is a several-second time exposure that makes the scene appear much brighter than it really was; the sky was black to our eyes. And I don’t know who the family is in the last photo; I only know that they looked cool, silhouetted against the glowing smoke like that. They may have been preparing the child for a human sacrifice to Madame Pele, the volcano goddess, because hey, somebody’s got to keep the crops from failing. Not sure if the kid survived the outing or not, but in any case I emailed the photo to her parents, who enjoyed it a lot.

Ruby Beach and Mount St Helens

(The two locations are actually 200 miles apart but with relatively little to say about each I decided to combine the visits — two days apart — into a single post.)

The Pacific coast of the Olympic Peninsula is still part of Olympic National Park but of drastically different character than either the mountains or the rain forest in the interior. It includes about a fifty mile stretch of dramatic beaches, one after the other, all as changeable as the weather and changed by the weather, from idyllic if chilly sunscapes to stark windswept plains, oppressed by pendulous clouds, mist-blown and dotted with eldritch rock formations like ruins of some vanished race. It’s easy to suppose — and I have no idea if this is true — that the creators of the old iconic video game Myst drew some inspiration from here.

We visited Ruby Beach, one of the more popular ones. It sits at the bottom of a steep hill — not quite cliffs – perhaps 150′ below the road and parking area, accessible by an easy switchback trail downward. Here was the scene as the lighting changed from sunny upon our arrival to cloudy and windier a short time later. The rocks, if not exactly foreboding, certainly created the atmosphere.

The water close to shore was rich with kelp, long woody strands a few inches in diameter. At least one otter was poking around among them, swimming north to south about 30 feet offshore. Janet, Tim, and Alice wandered north along the shore for a half mile or so while I stayed behind to take photos.

Forty-eight hours later we were viewing a very different scene: Mount St Helens. As you probably remember if you’re old enough, in March 1980 the mountain stirred. A series of violent eruptions and pyroclastic flows culminated two months later in a catastrophic explosion that blew off the uppermost 1300′ of the mountain, reducing its height from 9700′ to 8400′, and variously scorching or burying 230 square miles (600 sq km) of the surroundings. 57 people died.

There’s a visitor center and gift shop about ten miles before the main viewpoint, offering what at the time seemed like a disappointingly smoke- and haze-shrouded view. But we souvenired up — pyrite chunks and little bottles of volcanic ash for the grandsons — and continued the rest of the way up the road to the main viewing area directly across the valley from the eruption site. There were surprisingly few other visitors, especially given the crowds at the national park, and even a small outdoor snack bar selling, among other things “Crater Dogs” (a.k.a. a hot dog with sauerkraut). And here was the view:

Apocalyptic, non? In truth, this contrast-stretched photo shows more than our naked eyes beheld at the time; the cloud striations and smoky color of the sky (especially at upper right) were not nearly so obvious, the contrast diminished by the haze from the distant wildfires. But the image is real. Here’s an aerial view, two cell phone shots taken from an airplane four years ago by Alice as we were en route to view the August 2017 solar eclipse.

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At the viewpoint, there are needless to say a series of before and after photos, most interestingly showing the evolution of the crater and the terrain in the ~40 years since the eruption. In that short time a glacier has re-formed at the bottom of the crater, and an elongated basaltic dome, hundreds of feet high, has thrust up in the middle, squeezing the nascent glacier against the surrounding crater walls.

A humbling sight, worth the trip!

Volcano Night

You may already know that the Big Island boasts Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (HVNP), home to Kilauea Volcano, the most visited active volcano in the world. The past year has been an active one for Madame Pele — the Hawaiian volcano goddess, not the soccer player’s mother — both here and around the world. Mounts Etna and Stromboli have both been spewing dangerously away in Italy, but you definitely don’t want to get too near them. But Kilauea is another story: it is a so-called shield volcano, named for its gradually sloping shape, formed by more or less continuous lava outflows rather than intermittent catastrophic explosive eruptions. Consequently HVNP hosts over a million visitors per year, almost all of whom are not scalded to death.

Almost. Kilauea fatalities are extremely rare but not unheard of. The most recent one was three years ago, a local photographer who was overcome by toxic fumes caused by an unexpected rain shower onto the hot lava. Something like that happens once every several years or so, plus the even rarer suicide. (The last one of those was four years ago, a 38 year old California man who jumped into a crater, which you must admit is a tragically classy way to go.)

The point is, that Kilauea is mostly pretty safe unless you sneak into the park at 3 AM and depart from the marked trail to get to that just-right location for the photos that you want, as I did two nights ago. My partner in crime was professional photographer Don Slocum, whose link you definitely want to click because for my money he is the best photographer on the Big Island. We met at a craft fair a couple of years ago; I hired him for a couple of outings and got some great shots, and we have become friends. When I told him that I wanted to try and get some night shots of the recently-formed lava lake in the Halemaumau Crater at Kilauea’s 4000-foot summit, he said he knew a couple of good vantage points and we set down to planning the outing.

Don had an idea which had not even occurred to me, namely that if we timed our arrival to slightly precede the setting of the full (or nearly full) moon, then we had a shot at capturing the fairly rare “moonbow”, which is a nighttime rainbow caused by the light of the Moon instead of the Sun. It is likely that you have never even heard of that, let alone seen one. I’ve seen one once, about 20 years ago, also on the Big Island, and was certainly game to try for one though we both knew it was a longshot. If we positioned ourselves correctly — this is where the “departing from the marked trail” part comes in — we could in theory see both the moonbow and the active crater. This would require a confluence of several conditions: (1) the right phase of the Moon; (2) the right time just before a pre-dawn moonset; (3) clear skies except for (4) misty clouds in the east to catch and refract the moonlight from the westering Moon; and finally (5) phenomenal luck since the effect, like a daytime rainbow, usually only lasts for minutes. Like I said, a longshot, although by choosing the date and time correctly we could satisfy the first two conditions.

Alice and I had spent the late afternoon in Hilo, visiting and having dinner with some old friends. (Photos from Hilo in a future post, coming soon.) At about 8 PM we checked into the Volcano Inn, a very charming and rustic B&B located just a few miles from HVNP. Don drove over from Kona and picked me up at the ungodly time of 3:00 AM, an hour that should not exist in a civilized world (except that I am an astronomer and consequently way too familiar with it). We entered the park, drove to near the first location, and HOLY MOTHER OF GOD GRAB YOUR GEAR AND GET OUT OF THE CAR RIGHT NOW IT’S OVER THERE. I saw it first, a ghostly arc against the predawn sky, rising from the clouds above the lava-filled crater.

Now rainbows, as you know, are colorful beasts, more or less by definition. But we perceive color with our retinal cone cells, which require high light levels to activate. That’s another way of saying that we are colorblind in low light: dim objects in low light are detected only by our retinal rod cells, which see only black and white. And so to the naked eye a moonbow looks pale white. But to the camera, which enjoys the advantage of being able to take long exposures, it’s a different story. So here is how the scene looked after an 8-second time exposure:

Yes, this is a real photo.

See the stars? See the orange-lit cloud from the lava below? This is quite unlike any other picture I have taken in my life, or very likely ever will again.

The moonbow disappeared less than 5 minutes after we took our pictures, but now we were on a roll. We got the rest of our gear from the car, climbed over the fence marking the edge of the trail, and walked about 100 yards to a vantage point at the edge of the crater to get shots like this:

Just drop the One Ring right down here and everything will be cool.

We were not stupid enough to try and get any closer to the edge than this, however tempting that might be. Which to be honest, was not very tempting. I did think about flying the drone over it, which was a bad idea in two different ways: (1) this shot is also an 8-second time exposure, which is tough to achieve with a drone because it is insufficiently steady; and (2) in the unlikely event that a Park Ranger did show up, I would be out a $5000 fine, my drone license, and in all likelihood my drone itself. So… no.

Satisfied, we moved off to a different site, only slightly off-trail, that was more distant from the crater but which afforded a view of the now-risen Milky Way. Here are the results:

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These are 20-second time exposures. That’s the center of our Galaxy to the right of center of the bottom two pictures; it’s just to the right of the brightish area to the right of the tree. And in case you’re wondering why the tree is silhouetted in the middle image but lit up in the bottom one, it is because in the latter I “painted” the tree with a flashlight beam during the time exposure.

We got back to the B&B a little before 5:30 AM. I’m normally not a big fan of sleep deprivation but the night was worth it.

My Son

Actually I have two sons, both exceptionally fine human beings whom I love and am proud of beyond words.  But this post is not about either of them. In fact, it is not about anybody’s son. It’s about a place called Mỹ Sơn, written with all those accent marks that make Vietnamese a special kind of nightmare. I just left the accent marks out of the title so I could have a moderately clever opening line. (And at some point down the line I am going to write a post about the Vietnamese language, which is an utter beast.)

Mỹ Sơn is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a complex of temples and other buildings created between the 4th and 14th centuries by the Champa people, whom you have very likely never heard of. It’s considered to be one of the longest inhabited archaeological sites in Indochina, comparable in appearance to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and Ayutthaya in Thailand.  We spent yesterday morning and early afternoon there; it’s about an hour’s drive from Hoi An.

Naturally, this being such an important site, the US bombed the bejeezus out of it during the war. Much of it was destroyed, and the path among the ruins is pockmarked by 50 year old overgrown bomb craters, perhaps 30 feet wide and still 8-10 feet deep.

The Champa people were an extensive and aggressive group who were a big deal in central and southern Vietnam from about the 2nd century AD for a good thousand years or so. They were Hindu, not Buddhist, in particular venerating Shiva, part of the Hindu trinity that includes Vishnu and Brahma. In keeping with the whole yin-yang paradigm, and oversimplifying by about 2 billion light years, Vishnu is female, the creator, symbolized by the yoni (representing the female genitalia); Shiva is male, the destroyer, symbolized by the lingam (representing the male genitalia). There are stylized versions of each scattered throughout the complex; here is a yoni:

 If your lingam persists for more than 400 years, consult your doctor.

There is a path that meanders among the ruins, a number of which have armless, headless statues of Shiva in and around them. The arm- and headlessness of the statues are one of the many gifts of later Western occupiers, notably the French.

You will note from all of the above photos that the structures are made almost entriely out of brick. That is pretty remarkable in itself: it is very difficult to make bricks that will last for ~1500 years in this hot, wet climate. In fact, it is so difficult that no one knows how the Champa did it. The composition of the bricks is well known through various assay techniques, but the manufacturing process is still a mystery. Replacement bricks have been made as part of a partial site restoration process; you can see Phil pointing out some of the new bricks in the photo below. But these will not have anything like the longevity of the original structure.

At about the halfway point of the path through the complex, we came to a small open area that is used for a folk music performance, using traditional instruments as we have sen before, and dancers as well. They played for about 10 minutes and we continued on our way.

If you look carefully, you can see that the elaborate headdress worn by the dancer in red in the middle has a burning candle on top. Here’s a better view.

We continued along the path, which looped back to the starting point. There was a pavilion there where we saw yet another performance, this time more directly tied to the Champa and having a distinctly more Hindu flavor, albeit a little sexed-up for the tourists, e.g.:

By this time we were dance-performanced-out and, in keeping with our typical day here, drenched with sweat. So we retreated back to our hotel, Alice to get a massage (which costs about one-third here of what it does back home,) and me to take advantage of one of the hotel infinity pools.

Another Roadside Waterfall

Driving around in northern Iceland is a head-turning exercise in trying to take in first this volcanic feature, than that unnamed waterfall. The countryside is pretty isolated in the north, where the largest town, Akureyri, has a population of less than 19,000 which, amazingly, makes it the second largest city in Iceland after Reykjavik.

That Alaska-like low population density means that we needed to be mindful of our fuel tank, so we started the day by backtracking into Saudarkrokur for gas. While Tim and Alice coped with the one-pump street corner filling station, Janet and I walked down the block in search of a restroom, ultimately finding ourselves in the local bakery/tea room. It was there that we discovered that Icelanders are really excellent bakers with an inordinate fondness for pink icing. Seriously, everything they sold looked criminally mouth-watering, and half of it had pink icing. Wanting to blend in with the locals, I bought and ate a fresh doughnut with pink icing. It was as light as air and I’m sure contained at most zero calories. That’s how I know that they are excellent bakers.

The landscape in northern Iceland is oddly like Hawaii except for the large temperature difference and presence of sheep. It’s volcanic terrain dotted with cinder cones and the occasional serendipitous waterfall within a few hundred meters of the road. Here’s the first one we encountered, photographed by drone:

This is a pretty typical sight. In this case, we were still close to a fjord flowing northwestward, which at this time of year and this far inland was at a very low water level, creating this abstract scene as viewed from some 200 meters directly above.

I’m rather proud of this photo, but if you are having trouble visually parsing the scene, here it is again looking more upward towards the sea.

Swiveling the drone to look upstream towards the mountains (and the sun), the same river looks like this:

Such are the rewards of driving in northern Iceland. While I was flying the drone, Alice walked a quarter mile or so up the road, where we had passed a gravel lot packed with cars and trucks. Turns out that it was also packed with sheep: this was the venue where the various livestock owners identified their particular sheep via ear tags. The sheep all graze together, you see, and are herded together en masse and sorted by owner later.

We continued on our way and spotted a gravel spur and small parking lot at the head of a path leading down to a valley. A short walk down the path took us to a precipice overlooking a river with an oxbow bend around a steep basaltic hillside. Here are Alice and I defying death, about 15 meters above the valley floor on a somewhat precarious lookout point. We look a lot cheerier than we felt; the path was loose dirt and rock, slipperier than we’d like, and it was a long way down.

Our next destination was one of Iceland’s better-known waterfalls, the Goðafoss, which means “Waterfall of the Gods”. Like every stationary object in Iceland, this one has a legend associated with it. As the story goes, in the year 1000 a local chieftain named Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði — his friends called him Bob — was taking a lot of political heat from the Norse, who had recently converted to Christianity from Paganism and wanted Iceland to do the same. Chief Bob had to make the big decision about which way to go, and since I am not typing this by candlelight you probably know the outcome. Deciding that Icelanders should become Christian, he demonstrated his commitment by throwing all of his statues of Pagan gods into this waterfall. Hence the name. (What history conceals from us is that that Bob went home and got an earful from Mrs. Ljósvetningagoði, who went out and bought a new set of idols at Pier One the next day.)

Anyway, here’s Goðafoss. The main cascade (there’s a smaller one a short way downstream) is about 12 meters (40′) high. The river above it is the Skjálfandafljót (pronounced “Snuffleupaguss”), which is the fourth longest river in Iceland.

Our next stop — and our destination for the day — was Lake Mývatn, which means “Midge Lake” due to the ubiquitous dense swarms of the goddamn things. (They even got into our noses and mouths, and I can only imagine what it must be like in the summer. Thank God they don’t bite.) Mývatn is a popular tourist area because of all the geothermal activity: there are natural hot spring baths, nature trails through volcanic formations, and “resort farms” for lodging, including the one we are staying at. The lake itself is dotted with what appear to be mini-volcanoes, and sort of are. Here is the scene:

What they actually are, are “pseudocraters” (that’s their real name), essentially burst lava bubbles that formed when the original lava flow overran a marshy area. They’re also called “rootless cones” because despite their appearance they are not actually lava vents. Rather, the moisture in the swampy land under the then-hot lava flow boiled away and emitted steam from underneath the lava, swelling it into a bubble that hardened and later collapsed. It’s an odd, unearthly sight. Or at least I think it is, since the midges kept swarming around my head.

We finally came to rest at the Vogafjós Farm Resort. In case you are wondering what that means, it means that we have a very comfortable motel-like room, all wood paneled and with a super-comfy geothermally heated floor (!), and that there are cows outside. There is also an excellent farm-to-table restaurant, in this case the farm-to-table distance being zero. Their specialty is lamb — quite the best I have ever had — and “Geyser Bread”, which is a very moist dark rye bread baked by burying it in the hot ground near a geothermal vent. Yes, really. It’s great!

Lava, Actually

Kilauea is rightly famous for being both the most active and the safest volcano in the world. It is a so-called shield volcano for its gentle convex shape, formed that way both because of the composition of the lava and its more or less continuous flow. This nonetheless does not prevent the active regions from looking like a post-apocalyptic hellscape, or a parking lot the size of San Francisco after a nuclear bomb has gone off. Yesterday it looked like this:

If you look carefully you can see the zombies eating the tourists in the distance.

This is essentially a broad, flat crater, technically called a caldera. It’s about 3 miles (5 km) across and is dotted with number of craters-within-the-crater. The largest of these is Halema’uma’u, a good half mile across and 300 ft (90 m) deep. You’ve got a glimpse of it on the horizon in the picture above, where the steam is rising. said steam being the vapor cloud from the molten lava lake sitting at the bottom. You used to be able to hike across the caldera up to the edge of Halema’uma’u, a practice that the National Park Service strongly discourages today because of the likelihood that you will die. So access is closed off. It is nonetheless possible to get closer from a different vantage point along the caldera rim, from where it looks like this:

 That’s still not close enough to see the lava lake, unfortunately, but if you stick around till after sunset you can see still see the orange glow from it. Or at least you can if the vantage point is not completely socked in with fog, which it was when we tried. Speaking of which, you will notice that both of the above photos seem a little hazy. That phenomenon is the aptly-named “vog”, which is short for “volcanic fog”, a witch’s brew of water vapor, sulfur dioxide, and assorted volcanic particulates, and which on a bad day can blanket the entire island. You need an occasional healthy rainstorm to clear the crud out of the atmosphere and get you those beautiful views that you see on postcards.

A good fraction of the southeast corner of the Big Island is taken up by Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and a good part of that is taken up by one or another lava field. The fields are marked as having been laid down by one or another eruption, e.g., “November 1979 Lava Flow”. So you can collect all your favorites — “Ah, March 1972, that was a good one!” — though they pretty much all look like this:

Some of the lava fields are blacker than others — you can see that this one is kind of brownish — depending on the exact location and thus the gas content and mineral composition of a particular flow. There is not currently an active lava flow running down to the ocean, which when it happens affords the spectacular sight of the glowing 2000-degree stream falling into the sea and raising one hell of a steam cloud. When that does happen you can join up with a boat tour that sails along the coast and gets close enough to let the passengers see the show.   But alas, we won’t have that on this trip.

The caldera is at the summit of the mountain, at an elevation of 4000 ft (1200 m). It’s noticeably cooler there than at the coast, and much rainier than Kona as well. For those reasons, the vegetation at the higher elevations in the park is very different than elsewhere on the island. It is, in fact, very Jurassic World-y, with lots of ferns and cooler-weather plants.

Plant and wildlife in the vicinity of Kilauea can be unique to an astonishing degree because of a combination of topography and evolution. As a wide river of lava flows down to the sea, the terrain may cause the flow to split and then rejoin further downhill, resulting in a small “island” of untouched land in the midst of the molten flow. The plants and small ground-dwelling fauna (mostly insects) are thus temporarily cut off from the rest of the world, and so they do what Charles Darwin told them to do: continue to adapt to their local environment, which may be as small  as a couple of football fields. Such a region is called a kipuka, and the Big Island is home to a number of them. Kipukas can be the home to species and sub-species that are found, not only nowhere outside of Hawaii, but nowhere outside the kipuka. How’s that for specialization?

I mentioned earlier that Kilauea is known as the safest volcano in the world, because its pattern of long-duration eruptions and the nature of its magma vents prevent explosive pressures from building up. However, Pele — the Hawaiian volcano goddess, not the soccer player — is not real big on predictability and although there have been no Mt-Saint-Helens- or Pinatubo-style eruptions, there have been some pretty violent events that have altered the landscape. One, in late 1959, wiped out a heavily forested area with 16 explosions and a rain of volcanic ash, lava, and related stuff that you do not want to be standing under.  The result is an area called Devastation Trail, which is, indeed, um, devastated.

I mentioned in an earlier post that there are several types of lava, the two most common being a’a, which is the rough clinkery stuff, and pahohoe, which is ropy and relatively smooth. During an eruption a’a advances very slowly, at about a walking pace, a very, very hot wall that moves like an advancing glacier. Those glowing rivers that flow down to the sea are pahoehoe, and if the terrain is right then the top layer can cool and start to harden while the stuff underneath continues to flow. In that case you can end up with a hollow channel: a lava tube. The park has a famous one, Thurston Lava Tube, big enough for a crowd of people to walk through, as you can see below. The first image is the fern-lined entrance to the tube.

Those things hanging down from the ceiling are not stalactites; this is not a limestone caved formed by water laying down mineral deposits. They are tree roots, o’hia lehua trees to be exact. The o’hia lehua trees with their bottle-brush red flowers are one of the first forms of life to reestablish itself after a lava flow scours the land, and as you can see they are more than a little tenacious. As indeed, you would have to be if your ambition is to thrive on lava.