RACHEL CARSON

RACHEL CARSON

SPACESHIP EARTH

"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."

ADLAI STEVENSON, 1964

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

HAWAI'IAN VOLCANOS UPDATE: WITNESSING THE SACRED - MOTHER EARTH GIVING BIRTH TO NEW LAND = PELE'S CHILDREN :)

HALEAMAUMAU (USGS-'NOT PHOTO-SHOPPED')
 BRUCE OROMI 6 MAY
 BRUCE OROMI 6 MAY
 BRUCE OROMI 6 MAY
 BRUCE OROMI 6 MAY
 BRUCE OROMI 6 MAY
 BRUCE OROMI 6 MAY
 MICK KALBER AT WORK :)
 LEILANI ROAD-BLOCK
 BOTH ESCAPE ROUTES BLOCKED :)
 ACRES OF DEVASTATION OR BRAND NEW LAND
 PELE'S FIREWORKS
 JAGGER OVERLOOK PREDAWN LAST WEEK
 HALEAMAUMAU LEVEL DROPPING
 LOCUS OF QUAKES IS OFF-SHORE
 RELATIVE LAVA-FLOW RATES
 QUAKE CLUSTERS
OLDEST VOLCANOS TO WEST, YOUNGEST OVER MANTLE PLUME



HILINA SLUMP:  10% OF BIG ISLAND'S LAND-MASS

REPORT FROM CLOSE TO GROUND ZERO


"HAWAI'IAN VOLCANOS UPDATE: REPORT FROM 'GROUND ZERO'


I have found myself using words like 'unbelievable' and 'freaky' and 'exciting' a lot lately, to describe my responses to being here now; 'sad' and 'challenging', to describe the sudden new realities being faced by around 1700 people who have had to evacuate their homes, not knowing when and/or if they can ever go back and if so what might be there; and now creeping in are words like 'foreboding' and 'ominous', as I have more time to take it all in, brush up on the leading edge of tectonic vulcanology and relate it all to the 'big picture'.  It's interesting observing the activity of my mind since the big stuff started happening, a swirling maelstrom of nature lover, geo-physical warfare educator and activist, and indigenous science-fiction fan/writer who loves Arthur C. Clarke and Immanuel Velikovsky, and artist who paints like 'an aborigine scientist on acid', or so I was once told. 

Is nature 'striking back', just doing what she has always done whether we are here or not, and/or being engineered or 'forced' to behave in ways she wouldn't normally?

tel·e·ol·o·gy
ˌtelēˈäləjē,ˌtēlēˈäləjē
noun
PHILOSOPHY
  1. the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes.
    • THEOLOGY
      the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world.

I've been very interested in and attracted to volcanos for 13 years or more, when I kind of fell in love with them in New Zealand around 2005. I had visited Aotearoa's youngest volcano, Rangitoto, a few times and had even been invited to stay in a little 'batch' (cabin) there. I also made two visits to New Zealand's only active volcano, White Island, about a 1.5 hour boat ride east from Whakatane in the Bay of Plenty. 

Then in 2006 I was traveling in Chile for a few months and ended up living in a lovely town called Pucon about 6 hours south of Santiago, which is only a few kilometers from Rucapillan (its indigenous Mapuche name, her Euro name is Villarica). This was my first experience living for an extended period practically on the lower slopes of an active volcano in the world, the third most active in the world.

I've done the Tongariro Crossing walk on Te Iki a Maui (North Island NZ) 3 or 4 times, once when it was covered in snow, as well as camped out with my former partner Liesbet on the lower slopes of Ruapehu near Taranaki Falls.

In 1998 I spent a month visiting Maui, and went to the summit of Haleakala twice, then in 2013-14 I came here to the Big Island for 3.5 months and returned in January of this year.

I won't go into it here, but I seem to develop a kind of spiritual or almost mystical connection with the volcanos I have been privileged to visit and spend time with or near...I actually come to love them, to kind of feel their spirit and know their feelings to a degree. I know this sounds a bit new-age airy-fairy but it's really true. Volcanos are exquisite (a Carl Sagan word!) manifestations or expressions of both the beauty and power of Mother Earth, capable of ineffable tranquility and catastrophic upheaval.

I had already been in the process of contacting some of the top vulcanologists over the past few weeks, especially since I had gone up to Volcanos National Park and then to the Mauna Kea summit about two weeks ago, in order to learn more about this 'isolated volcanic archipelago' called Hawai'iki, formed from magma extruded upward from a major mantle plume then dragged slowly westward as the Pacific plates goes walkabout.

FRAME GRAB FROM MICK KALBER'S VIDEO 6 MAY (@ around 1:16) TO ME THIS LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE SOME KIND OF DRAGON'S CLAW OR ABSTRACT GODZILLA BEING!

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE:

I've been trying to cover a lot of truly HUGE issues lately, for example, all the whale and dolphin strandings and exploding war that my species is waging on life in the ocean; the spate of 'unnatural disasters', most recently, the record-breaking and highly destructive floods on the island of Kauai; now, in the wake of disaster on Kauai, what seems to be a global volcanic and tectonic upheaval with 'ground zero' being the 'Hawai'ian hot spot.'

There's not enough hours in a day. Hopefully that won't be changing any time soon, but these days, you never know? I will be continuing these updates even after I'm back in Australia next week, and with no less intensity of interest or concern. To be here while all this is going on is a synchronicity on the same order as being at Big Mountain when the Chernobyl meltdown occurred in 1986. Day by day I am appreciating the gravity of the situation...not to mention the viscosity and thermal gradients...as well as under-going a crash course in Hawai'ian vulcanology. I will do my best, as always, to share the coolest...or hottest in this case...and most relevant information I can glean.

RELEVANT LINKS

DUTCHSINSE VIDEOS ON GLOBAL VOLCANISM



MY VIDEO FROM 1 MAY, JAGGER OVERLOOK AT KILAUEA SUMMIT


HALEAMAUMAU TIME-LAPSE (USGS-HVO)

KILAUEA-IKI 1955 - OVER 900M HIGH FOUNTAIN


NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TSUNAMI VIDEO EXCERPT

IF THE HILINA SLUMP FALLS IN...

THIS IS A BIT 'HOLLYWOODIZED'...YOU'VE SEEN THIS WALL OF WATER MANY TIMES IN VARIOUS DISASTER FLICKS LIKE 'THE ABYSS' AND 'DEEP IMPACT'...but in 'The Abyss' the tsunami was caused by the aliens, and in 'Deep Impact' if was from comet fragments, only in THIS scenario it is caused by 10% of the land-mass of the Big Island sloughing off into the ocean...apparently this kind of thing has happened before, and, sure, the East Rift fissures seem to be opening along a huge crack that's right where this boundary would be...and...did the big 6.9 last week break anything loose down there? Ultimately, only time will tell but the USGS scientists are inundated with phone calls from all over the world because everyone wants to know...only Pele really knows, however...

Friday, May 4, 2018

HAWAI'IAN VOLCANOS UPDATE: REPORT FROM 'GROUND ZERO' (ALMOST !)

 PU'U O'O PLUMING YESTERDAY
 PU'U O'O FROM THE WEST,  NEW FISSURE
 KILAUEA OVERLOOK ONTO HALEAMAUMAU
 THERMAL IMAGE OF HALEAMAUMAU CRATER
 NEW CRACKS IN ROAD NEAR LEILANI ESTATE
 NAHAU CRATER ABOUT 4 MILES WEST OF PU'U O'O
AERIAL VIEW OF PU'U O'O, SHE'S EMPTY
 OVER 300 QUAKES IN ELLIPSE IN LAST 96 HRS
(NOTE: I AM NEAR THE HAWAIIAN SHORES SHADED AREA COAST)
 VIEW FROM JAGGER OVERLOOK (LUMIX TZ-15)
 VIEW FROM JAGGER OVERLOOK (LUMIX VXF-990)
VIEW FROM JAGGER OVERLOOK (NIKON D4S)
 MAUNA LOA
 MAUNA KEA
MAUNA KEA OBSERVATORY COMPLEX, KECKS 1 & 2

 MAUNA KEA OVER-LOOK...MISTY
 THE CALM BEFORE THE...SHOW?
BEAUTIFUL SPIDER ART :)

ON THE BRINK RADIO #247 HAWAI'IAN VOLCANOS UPDATE: REPORT FROM GROUND ZERO

Greetings from Hawaiian Volcanos Ground Zero. Well, not quite...'ground zero' would be where the lava has been coming out of the ground for the past 24 hours, about 12 miles from here. But about an hour ago I felt two quakes, one was around 5 or so but then the next one was, officials are saying, a 6.9 whose epicenter was about 17 miles from here. It shook the house for about 20 seconds. I was in the kitchen making a batch of certified organic vegetable and fruit juice, a long over-due treat possible because my friend loaned me her juicer...beet-root, carrot, celery, apple, ginger, and lemon...I continued jucing throughout the quake. But I was a bit unnerved with my friend came and told me than an announcement had said this quake was felt island-wide, and that we needed to be on stand-by to evacuate! Yikes. I diligently started organizing all my stuff, even though I am in the middle of several paintings and heaps of rocks. 

Lucky that I'm never that far away from being mobile, but there's no way I'm evacuating this place and leaving anything here, not with my flight to Sydney coming up on Monday 14 May. YAY...I get to come home again after over 3 months in Hawai'i. My Australian visa just got approved a couple days ago so I then moved ahead with getting a ticket. I've come to like it here quite a bit, especially in the last couple weeks due to a new friend who has taken me up to the volcanos a couple times, someone to share crazy adventurousness with. 

We went up to the summit of Mauna Kea two weeks ago, and I accidentally split the head of my drum 'Io Paikea Sun-thunder Kaka-Tatanka Wave Dancer' as I was drumming exactly at sunset, and exactly as Taiowa went down I hit the drum a bit too hard, and in the extreme low humidity and low temperature, it made a 10cm long crack in the head. Today I mended it with some vegan floss and Aqua-Seal, which should make it as good as new...and, just in case there was any connection between my drum and the volcano eruption that began a few days ago, to ask Pele to close the opening.

Interestingly, my friend Wally at whose house I'm staying, showed me a volcanos video a few days ago and I was inspired to look at the photographer's web-site, Mick Kalber. He is the premiere volcano photographer on the island, and he and Wally are old friends. I got in touch and he said he'd be happy to do an interview with me, but that, indeed, the next few days would be quite hectic, what with the collapse of the crater floor of Pu'u O'o, which had been brimming over with lava, but is now totally empty. All that lava went somewhere. And the Haleamaumau crater up within the main Kilauea has been very active. On Tuesday evening we saw huge fountains of lava leaping skyward, maybe 30 to 40 meters high, from a distance of 1.2 miles line of sight.

A large part of Leilani Estate has been evacuated since yesterday, due to lava coming up there through some fissures, with a good deal of gaseous emissions which can be nasty to inhale.

I asked Pele if she would put on a show for me while I was still on the island; she has come through, I just hope that we've seen the maximum displacements and shaking and eruptions already. The Hawai'ian volcanos are in general known for their relatively gentle eruptions and flows, which usually allows them to be studied and plenty of time for people to get out of the way of on-coming lava. But there's a lot of unpredictability, even among the experts.

I wanted to get this post up and out there just in case another bigger quake happens...but I am praying that it doesn't. Please send blessings and prayers for all of the Big Island, all of Hawai'i, including Kauai which was severely damaged by floods two weeks ago, and all of the marine life who will be under attack even more once RIMPAC starts in Hawai'ian waters in June.

I will keep you updated on a daily basis. If you'd like more information just email me at therockist@gmail.com

MUCH ALOHA AND MANY BLESSINGS FROM THE SHAKEY ISLES :)

ON THE BRINK RADIO #247 HAWAI'IAN VOLCANOS UPDATE: REPORT FROM GROUND ZERO

RELEVANT LINKS


MICK KALBER'S VIDEO PAGE

MICK'S WEBS-SITE

BRUCE OROMI'S WEB-SITE (STILL PHOTOGRAPHER)


HVO/USGS INFORMATION