Tag Archives: Lava

Green Lake

Green Lake was, until June 2 last year, Hawaii’s biggest freshwater lake. This isn’t a dramatic claim since freshwater lakes are in short supply in Hawaii. There are only two freshwater lakes on the Big Island, the other being Lake Waiau, near the summit of Mauna Kea. Green Lake had a surface area of about 2 acres and was no more than 20 feet deep in the center, but it was a popular spot with both locals and tourists who liked to swim and picnic there.

The lava flow from last year’s eruption in lower Puna at first curled around the pu’u, the center of which was Green Lake. But on June 2, the flow breeched the surrounds, boiled away the water and filled it with lava.

The top photo shows that pu’u that contained Green lake, now filled with lava. The bottom photo shows Green Lake in relation to the flow and the area around it. The lava came from the upper left of the photo. It flowed around the pu’u and entered the lake from the southeast. The photo also shows how the flow reached the coast. The area in the top right of the photo used to be Kapoho Bay and its surrounding housing. A white speck is visible on the edge of this flow, which is one of only three houses there that survived the flow’s destructive progress.

At the bottom of the lower photo is untouched land, including a road that runs into, and now terminates, at the flow’s edge.

Halema’uma’u Crater

This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Danger.’ (See more offerings here.) It seemed a suitable opportunity to post some photos reviewing on Kilauea Volcano’s last eruption, which began in May of last year.

The bottom photo, taken from the Jaggar Museum overlook, shows the scene on the morning of April 25, 2018. Lava in the active vent in Halema’uma’u Crater, at Kilauea’s summit, was just below the crater floor and had been overflowing into the crater in previous days. The overflow is the large dark area to the right of the glowing lava.

By early May, the lava level in the vent had dropped around 1,000 feet. This drop occurred at the same time that lava disappeared from Pu’u O’o vent. Not long afterwards, cracks opened in the ground at Leilani Estates, a housing subdivision in the southeastern part of the island. By the end of May, 24 fissures had opened in the area. The most prolific lava flow emanated from Fissure 8, which flowed to the ocean and created more than 800 acres of new land. However, more than 700 homes were destroyed by this eruption.

Meanwhile, back at the summit, the absence of lava in the vent in Halema’uma’u Crater resulted in a series of collapses of the crater floor. Each collapse triggered earthquakes and shot clouds of ash and toxic gas thousands of feet into the air.

The top photo shows Halema’uma’u Crater as it looks today. The crater is twice the size it was the year before and the floor, which was mostly flat, is now a huge cascading pit. In the upper left of the photo, the Jaggar Museum, where I stood to take the bottom photo, can just be seen. It was heavily damaged by the earthquakes, as were the parking lot and access road. It’s also much closer to the crater edge than it was. (Technically the crater edge is closer to it, since the museum hasn’t moved!)

The museum, along with the rest of the park, closed in May 2018, because of the eruption. While much of the rest of the park reopened in September, Jaggar Museum did not. There’s a good possibility it never will and that its fate will be the same as the portion of Crater Rim Drive in the middle photo. A significant length of that road, which used to encircle the whole summit caldera, was destroyed, including the section in the photo which slid, intact, into the crater.

Things have settled down since September 2018 and there has been no volcanic activity anywhere on the island since then. But Kilauea remains an active volcano and will undoubtedly erupt again. It’s just that no one knows exactly when or where that will happen.

Lava trees

Lava Tree State Monument is in the southeast part of the island, within half a mile of the edge of last year’s flow. As the name suggests, it has some good examples of lava trees.

Lava trees are formed when molten lava coats a tree, burning the wood, and leaving just the cooling lava shell that surrounded it. There are two ways this can happen. One is when a flow surrounds the trees and then drains away. The other way is for falling lava to cover and burn the trees.

The lava trees in Lava Tree State Monument were formed by the first of these two methods. A lava flow in 1790, as high as 11 feet, surrounded ohia trees in this part of the island, and burned the wood away. When new fissures opened soon after, the lava in this flow drained back underground, but the lava immediately surrounding the trees had cooled enough that it was already hardening, so it remained, retaining each tree’s shape in its center.

The photos show lava trees in the park, a closer view of one showing the hollow center, and a view of the hollow core where new plant life is taking hold. In some cases, this new plant life is new trees growing out of the old, hollow lava trees.

For more information about Lava Tree State Monument, go to https://hawaiistateparks.org/parks/hawaii/lava-tree-state-monument/.

Road across the flow

Road across the flow

I’ve posted about my January visit to Pohoiki here, here, and here. The reason I was able to make that visit is because the county finally put a temporary road over one of the flows that cut off that part of the island.

One of the features of lava flows is that they don’t uniformly erase everything in their path. Sometimes they flow around areas. Sometimes they stop and a new flow emerges to one side. Sometimes a flow blocks one side of an area and a different flow blocks the other side.

The 2018 Kilauea eruption was no different in this regard. Some houses escaped destruction, but became inaccessible by road. Pohoiki was one of those places, until the new road was completed.

Things move at a leisurely pace in Hawaii and one might think the delay in building the road was due to this, but in this case, the county had good reason to wait. The simple reason is that they had to wait for the lava to cool down. It took several months for the lava to cool enough to make it practical to build a road over the flow. Even then it would not have been safe to cut through the flow and build the road at its former level.

How quickly the lava cools depends on many things including hot hot it was to begin with and how deep the flow is. It can take many months before the lava at the heart of a flow cools down enough to solidify and not present a danger.

For those interested in what happened during that 2018 eruption, the PBS show, NOVA, broadcast an episode titled ‘Kīlauea: Hawaiʻi on Fire.’ It’s about 50 minutes long and has a bit of a dramatic ‘will anyone survive’ tone in places, but I found it very informative. It might be available at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/, but if not you can see it here.

First Big Island visit

Pololu beach

Turtle at PunuluuTropical foliageLava flowingThis week’s Friendly Friday challenge theme is ‘Turning point.’ (See more responses here.) Since this is a photo blog about the Big Island it seems appropriate to post some photos from my first visit here in 2010, a visit which was the catalyst for the move to the island. There was no ‘ah ha’ moment, but these photos give a general idea of some of the things that appealed.

The top photo is Pololu beach on the North Kohala coast. Second photo is a Hawaiian green turtle resting on the black sand beach at Punalu’u County Beach Park. Third photo is tropical foliage next to a small cascading stream. Fourth photo shows some small lava breakouts in the flow that was active at that time. Conveniently, that activity was about 100 yards from the parking area and only 10 feet or so beyond where I was standing. The bottom photo is a view of Two Step, a popular snorkeling spot, from Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park.

Two Step from Place of Refuge

Pohoiki fires

Pohoiki bench and lava

Yesterday I posted here about revisiting Pohoiki, also known as Isaac Hale Beach Park. Today, in response to this week’s Sunday Stills challenge on the theme of ‘Fire,’ (more responses here) I’m posting a couple more photos from that visit. Being perverse, I’ve chosen photos with no fire in them.

The top photo shows where the flow from the 2018 Kilauea eruption came to a halt, in the park’s picnic area. It has swallowed up one of the picnic tables, as well as some surrounding trees. What I find interesting about this is that neither the table, nor the trees, caught fire. I think this is because, by this time, the supply of lava had already stopped reaching the extremities of the flow and, consequently, those areas had already cooled considerably to below the temperature needed to cause combustion.

The bottom photo has a simpler, fire-related appeal. It could easily be captioned, ‘the barbecue pit meets the mother of all barbecues.’

Pohoiki barbecue pit and lava