Lately there have been a between one and three hybrid explosion/earthquake per day that turns the plume at the Halema’uma’u vent brown. Also each day, about a dozen earthquakes large enough to be felt have originated in and around the Kilauea Caldera. Smaller ones have fluctuated between 40 and 100 per day. We have had vog daily in Kona. And felt at least one of the earthquakes here, a 3.3, on Saturday night. Just a quick… thump! … like the entire island settled down a sixteenth of an inch. And then a little smaller … thunk! That was all.

If this seems a bit short, it is because we are going to stop posting for a while. It’s the economics, my dear blogmates. The number of people coming to Hawaii is way down. It was decided that it was time to start cutting costs. One of the places costs were cut was our time to do this blog. We’re all still here and working on coffee things. But we have to do other things with our time.

We’ll keep the site up as it is, with all the informative posts about Kona Coffee, probably until we start posting again. Until that sunny day when we are united… on behalf of all the people who have worked hard to bring this blog to you, I wish you the best in these uncertain times. May all go well for you and your loved ones. And if there is a bit of rain, please remember for me that often a rainbow follows. And before I get a little misty, I will wish you a fond Aloha.

Me ke Aloha pumehana (warmest regards),
Bill, John, Mark, Mary, Pat

The booms are not capitalized because they are not big booms. Still, they warrant mentioning.

Thursday morning there was a hybrid explosion/earthquake that turned the plume at the Halema’uma’u vent brown. More significantly, there was, as the USGS put it, a ’strong hybrid explosion/earthquake’ at 1:13 AM Friday. USGS assumes a change of vent size from this one, but details have not been released. Fog obscured the vent a lot last night. But when I look at the webcam pics of the vent, it looks about the same size but possibly a little larger. The plume is pretty active today.

Small earthquakes, too small to be located, are up to 100 per day. There were seven larger ones, although not large enough to be felt here in Kona. Two of those were under the Kilauea Caldera.

Emissions remain high. We have vog. The rain is helping to keep it down, here in Kona.

We have been pretty quiet the last few days, both the volcano and me. That does not mean that we have not been active. But it does mean we have not been exceedingly interesting. However, now it’s time to let you know what is going on.

The vent at Halema’uma’u rises white each day over the peaceful pahoehoe (pah-hoy-hoy, lava that is smooth like cake batter) plains of the Ka’u Desert. It turns brown on occasion, usually in conjunction with a hybrid earthquake/explosion. Bits of volcanic glass are found by the brave USGS collection team each day, often subjected to roars and/or other sounds coming from the vent.

There are lots of tiny earthquakes. They have been increasing steadily to over 80 per day. That’s a pretty high number. And there is ‘weak inflation’ continuing at the summit. Most interestingly, an 4.3 earthquake centered at Kilauea’s south flank was felt all over the island Friday at 5:59. We definitely felt it here in Kailua Kona. It did no noticeable damage anywhere on the island, but it was kind of an odd one. Most relatively small earthquakes here are pretty sudden… thunk, like the entire island dropped one-sixteenth of an inch. The larger ones do tend to create a back and forth motion. This one was more back-and-forth. So even though relatively small, it had the feel of a larger one. I hope that makes sense. Anyway, it felt more like a Los Angeles earthquake. Except we’re on an island.

But you know… now that I think about it, most of the recent smaller ones have tended to give us more back-and-forth, rock’n'roll type action. Hummm. Makes one wonder if something might be up on a grand scale. I guess we’ll find out.

The vent at night is showing moderately, and is variable in strength. Sometimes it winks out, which is usually associated with rockslides or gas pistoning events. Or night fog in the Caldera. Hard to tell which. There has been no word lately from USGS about the lava lake within the Halema’uma’u vent, which leads me to believe they have not had the funds to fly another helicopter over it. It is not a small decision to do an overflight. In Hawaii, and especially on the Big Island, we have helicopters go down quite a lot in comparison to their numbers, or so it seems. Akamai (ah-caw-my, smart, sharp) people attribute the increased risk to the corrosive effects of the volcano’s emissions. Flying even near the vent is very hazardous, much more than it may seem on the face of it. And the helicopter company has to spend more on maintenance, parts, mechanics, etc. The prices of commercial flights for visitors to the Big Island has climbed out of sight recently.

Emissions into the air remain high. Halema’uma’u is back up to nearly 2.5 million pounds of sulfur dioxide a day, and the East Rift Zone is contributing about 3.75 million pounds, for a total of about 6 million pounds a day of stuff that turns into sulfuric acid, plus all the neat little add-on heavy metals and rare earths. Still, that is better than the 12 million or more that we were getting for a while. Still, we have a significant amount of vog every day here in Kona. Relatively blue but hazy skies in the early morning. The vog turning visible and gray somewhere around noon most days. We are having some heavy rain at times, mostly in the late afternoons and night, which does help a lot.

East Rift Zone flows are minimal, with a minimal amount of lava entering the ocean. But the action seems to be picking up a little.

So. Are we winding down? Or are we in the calm before the storm, so to speak? If anything interesting happens, I’ll let you know.

There will be a Vog Seminar held Thursday, Sept. 25 at the Convention Center, 1PM to 4PM.

On Oahu.

Not the Big island of Hawaii.

Sponsored by the State of Hawaii, in conjunction with the Hawai’i SOS Safety, Opportunity, Sustainability conference, the Hawaii State Department of Labor and Industrial Relations is offering a FREE! seminar. They will talk about the “potential health effects of VOG (emphasis theirs) and what employers can do to mitigate the effects in the workplace.”

This was announced by a full-color ad in West Hawaii Today, which charges an extra $405.00 per day for color, and it has been running for several days. You are probably used to all color ads in your newspaper, so this does not seem unusual to you. But being in a sort of backwater here, the smaller ads in our newspaper are mostly not in color. In this case, the color cost much more than the ad itself.

But not to worry! Lucky us on the Big Island, and lucky you wherever you may be, whether you are somewhere in Hawaii Nei or elsewhere on this planet, we all get to listen along during the LIVE WEBCAST of the seminar, to be presented at:

www.hawaii.gov/labor

I’m thinking that address may not exactly right for the actual webcast, but a person should be able to find it from there. In any event, that’s the only address given in the ad. And please do not blame the messenger if, when it comes time to join in, the site is unavailable. Hopefully things will work out fine, but I just would not count on it too heavily.

Anyway, I’m just imagining what the seminar will suggest. “… so you must tell your employees there is no problem, they simply have to hold their breath a while. Say, until December. We’ll give you an update then.”

Frankly, I thought the CDC report went something like, ‘we don’t have any idea what you should do, but we need more money so we can come back and study things some more. We didn’t have enough money this time to do a good job.’ But maybe the State of Hawaii, which CDC castigated for not doing enough about the vog previously, now has some good answers. Perhaps this conference is a response to that criticism. And the full color ad is to show everyone the State really cares about them.

Okay, there are sensible things one might say. Stay inside and turn on the air conditioning (like people aren’t doing that anyway). Don’t run a triathlon… woops, there is the Ironman Triathlon being run here on the Big Island on the 11th of October. Well, maybe the volcano will be done by then. Or perhaps those wacky guys who so enjoy challenging themselves to excel will enjoy the unusual treat of sucking in lithium and fluorine and sulfur dioxide/sulfuric acid with every breath. On a heavy vog day, that would certainly be an exhilarating challenge. Some years the ambulances are busy without the vog.

Back on track… whatever that may be today… I’m just glad that our State resources are being used wisely to give us tools to, well, do something about the vog. We can stay inside and listen to the webcast while sipping a cup of Kona coffee and reading West Hawaii Today, and not go out and run a triathlon. That sounds like a real plan.

We’ve been using a lot of electrons talking about the volcano this month, so I thought I should throw in a line or two about coffee, since that is what BehindTheCoffee.com was originally all about.

Yet the activity at Kilauea is intimately wedded to what is happening with coffee on the Big Island of Hawaii. There has been so much more rain for those Kona coffee farms at lower elevations since the vent at Halema’uma’u opened, that they are experiencing superabundant flowering on the coffee trees, and have started picking coffee cherry quite early in the season. Farms at higher elevations are also experiencing more rain, but that is not as unusual for them, and they are just now starting the picking season, at a relatively normal time. The rain is washing the potentially harmful elements in the vog off the coffee leaves and into the ground, where it appears the coffee trees enjoy the influx of trace elements.

There are ads in West Hawaii Today ISO coffee pickers. In prior years, these ads have tended to elicit a rather anemic response, because picking coffee is a really hard job, and takes a surprising amount of skill, and people would rather work at Wally Mart. But not this year. The bumper crop is being matched by a corresponding spike in people who are all too happy to pick coffee. What that says about the economy is abundantly obvious.

As far as the volcano goes, activity is down overall, and emissions in the East Rift Zone have dwindled to pre-event levels. But Halema’uma’u is still at 4 to 5 times background values, and the plume is turning brown with ash a couple of times a day. About a dozen earthquakes are located beneath Kilauea Caldera or nearby each 24 hours, but smaller earthquakes are decreasing. No report of significant events.

We’re getting a break in the mornings, with blue skies, or at least a good imitation of them, to greet our rising. It actually feels like a real summer’s day today, which brings a smile to my lips. But later each day, the vog in the air photosynthesizes and we get gray, obviously voggy afternoons and evenings and sometimes nights. I can see the process for the day starting as I write this. The quality of the sunlight is changing, getting noticeably less bright, taking on a yellow tinge. The vog cometh.

I don’t know if it’s just the normal inversion layer around Kona (much like that found in Los Angeles) that is recirculating past emissions, or if the total current emissions of Kilauea are just still enough to trouble us. Whichever, it’s sort of better, and sort of still the same. The effects of the vog on people’s sinuses seems to be pretty much 24/7, although perhaps lighter some of the time. A couple of afternoons ago, it looked like about the second worst vog ever here, just eyeballing it. Clearly… or rather, not so clearly… we are definitely not out of the woods yet.

It is a magnificent morning in Kailua Kona, absolutely beautiful. After yesterday, which was perhaps the second heaviest vog day ever, it is such a welcome relief. The sky is, in fact, actually blue right above me. Friends north of Kailua that I’ve spoken with on the phone say that up by the airport, the air is crisp and clean at the moment. Such a fantastic change!

If only for a while. The horizon whispers haze, and when the scent of the air is examined closely, there are metallic undertones. I do not expect the blueness to last through the day. But even a few hours of remembering how it used to be is greatly appreciated.

An akamai (ah-caw-my, very sharp and intelligent) BehindTheCoffee.com reader, Larry, has suggested that after the vent at Halema’uma’u was enlarged by explosive events, we might see a less activity, as pressure is released more easily by the expanded diameter of the vent. I told him I was of the opinion that the more activity we see, the more there probably is to come.

Today would seem to fall squarely into Larry’s camp. As I said to him, nothing would make me happier.

So perhaps we are on the way toward the end of the event. Yet… the plume turned brown five times yesterday, each time after what was described in technical terms by USGS as ‘a loud sound’. And there were sixteen earthquakes located under the Caldera, with over 80 smaller ones, more than twice the background value.

I think the summit tiltmeter and the GPS instrumentation in the caldera represent the mood accurately: no significant inflation nor deflation.

I suppose we’ll see in the next few days whether our glass was half empty or half full. My hope is that the glass goes away altogether for a while and we have more blue skies.

I’ve put off writing this post, because it seems like sour grapes. But that’s what we’ve been handed, and I guess it should be talked about. You can skip this one, if you want. I wouldn’t mind.

The hot shot team from Center for Disease Control, dispatched to Hawaii in late July by the Environmental Protection Agency under the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture… you can see where this is going already, can’t you… has issued a report. Their major findings, in a nutshell:

1. “There is a huge increase in the amount of a hazardous substance that’s being released into the environment. A huge increase.” That from Janet Yocum, EPA’s team Coordinator on the Big Island.

My comment: words fail me.

2. “Not only does it affect the Big Island, it affects the entire state. We were surprised by the extent by which it could be felt.”

My comment: why so surprised? The USGS update page (which has been running longer than the Halema’uma’u vent has been active) lists in their Definition of Terms information about the MODIS satellite pair that goes over Hawaii twice a day. You can see a representative picture from space taken on May 20 of this year here.

I picked this one because you can clearly see the plume of our vent at Halema’uma’u, like a thin stream of clouds on the lower east (right hand side) of the Big Island, which is the southernmost island in the center of the picture. You can also see the way the natural trade winds clear a corridor between the Big Island and the next island north, Maui, through the Alenuihaha (ah-lay-new-ee-haw-haw) channel. That channel, btw, is known for it’s strong weather, as winds whip in between the giant volcano mountains of Haleakala (haw-lay-ah-caw-la) on Maui and Mauna Kea (mon-ah kay-ah) and Mauna Loa (mon-ah low-ah) on the Big Island

You can also plainly see the grey vog, not only hanging off the leeward side of the Big Island, but all so all the others along the chain, and even hanging in the skies of the windward sides.

This is a picture from May 20,so my question is… why surprised? Everyone could see it months before the team was even thought of.

3. More money should be spent to study emission impacts and evacuation systems and equipment.

My comment: my turn to be surprised. I thought that’s what this study was supposed to be about. Then again, they spent only $170,000.00 of your tax dollars on their Hawaiian vacation… woops, sorry, I mean their investigations. As Ms. Yocum said, “Certainly, if we had more time and more money, we could have done a much better assessment.”

As I let those words burn through my consciousness, I wonder what sort of evacuation scheme they might come up with. I suppose we can run to one side of the island or the other, but with the shifting trade winds, what sort of safely would that offer us in case of a significant event? Or are they thinking to fly us off the island? We have two not very large airports, and 150,000 people. I hope they do the math. I wonder how long it would take for 500 to 1,000 large airplanes to load and take off. And where we would get those planes, here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?

Or was she thinking of the pyroclastic flows that happened here a century or two ago, the ones that move at up to 350-500 miles per hour? If she has a way to get people out of the way in time, I’d sure like to hear it.

But I’m talking silly talk. This is why they need to come back and study the situation some more. Maybe the next time they’ll find out that lava is very, very hot. They will be very surprised, no doubt.

This is very cool! It’s a movie showing the lava bubbling in the Halema’uma’u vent. Click here to watch it.

I see that I need to restate what I wrote in the previous post about gas pistoning, because it was incomplete. I plead vog, as usual, and for my punishment, I get more vog. Here is the complete explanation.

Magma in the Halema’uma’u vent is freely bubbling most of the time, as shown in this movie. The bubbling does eventually cause the pistoning effect, but there is more to it. Occasionally a thin layer of the surface cools and hardens (this is why the incandescence of the vent ‘winks out’ sometimes). The gas that causes the bubbling builds up pressure behind the thin top layer. Suddenly we have an explosive gas piston event that blows the top layer off, showering tephra (the technical term for all kinds of volcanic ejecta) as far as several hundred feet up to the floor Kilauea Caldera, which contains Halema’uma’u Crater.

Those blasts also continue to blow away material from the sides of the vent. So I also need to update you on the current dimensions of the Halema’uma’u vent. Today USGS released new information that tells us the vent has grown to about 215 feet across, more than double its size since it first appeared on the crater floor. A graphic comparison between the original size of the vent in April and today’s dimensions can be found here.

As a reward for those of you who have slogged through all the stuff above and stayed with me to the end of this post, here is a special nightshot movie of the explosive eruption at 8:13 PM on September 2. That eruption scattered lava rocks as big as 8 inches long all around the Halema’uma’u crater rim.

We have lava in the Halema’uma’u vent, says the USGS this morning!

They report witnessing a ’sloshing’ lake of glowing, molten rock 330 feet below the rim of the vent. It is over 150 feet in diameter, which is a pretty good sized lava pond.

Well, actually, the molten material in the pond, which may reach hundreds or even thousands of feet into the depths of the earth, is technically called magma, according to the official USGS definition. Magma is molten rock below the surface of the earth, and lava is molten rock above the surface of the earth. But call it lava or call it magma, this an extremely significant sighting, and it is very exciting to those of us who are waiting for the main event to happen someday. This would seem to say that day just might be getting close.

Official people saw the lake twice Friday from a hovering helicopter they had flown in for exactly that purpose. They had strongly suspected the existence of magma in the vent not far from the surface, but had not been able to see far enough down in the vent from ground level to confirm their suspicions. And I can certainly understand why they did not want to stick their head into that tumultuous plume.

The afternoon flight saw the pond in a lovely roiling boil, with many bubbles welling up and bursting. This is called ‘gas pistoning’, and there is a very fine movie of that kind of action here. It’s hard to grasp how very large the scale of this vent actually is. It’s an impressive 90 to 120 feet across, and the entire surface bubble bursts and explodes at the same time. Our vent is almost a third larger.

All this goes a long way in explaining why the vent has been enlarging.

Very hot gas… which we have been seeing for days as the rhythmic flares at night and the flash ash clouds during daylight hours… blasts rock from the walls of the vent, along with carrying small amounts of magma up above the surface as lava… the lava that our brave USGS team has been gathering as volcanic glass each day from around the mouth of the vent and several hundred feet beyond, as well as the 3-inch ‘lava bomb’ that landed a couple of days ago in a USGS rain gauge about a thousand feet from the vent.

Kilauea summit has been inflating since about 4AM September 3. We continue with episodes of seismic tremor, which is becoming almost periodic. There have been more hybrid earthquakes/explosions. 17 locatable earthquakes beneath Kilauea, with 12 of those under Halema’uma’u. Surface flow in the East Rift Zone is minimal, although there is still significant outgassing occurring, indicating a significant amount of pressure in the Kilauea system.

We all await upcoming events.

This is not an official notice of a ‘Volcano Watch’. Well, actually, there is an official Volcano Alert Level: WATCH posted on the USGS website. But they’ve been saying that for months. This is a “really… keep your eye on the volcano, because bigger things are starting to happen” sort of watch suggestion… thing.

Anyway, take a look at the pics, and draw your own conclusions.

Wednesday night the vent at Halema’uma’u pulsed with the same timing as the seismic tremors that started about noon Wednesday. These episodes of continuous ground vibrations have been going on and off for days. The plume incandescence was described as ‘very bright’. This morning, the brave USGS ash collection team actually had ash falling on them as they collected lots of rock dust and some small pieces of volcanic glass. And for the first time, a new ’squeaking or high-pitched scraping noise’ was heard in addition to the vent roar, which was at a relatively low level. That scraping noise was said to sound like rocks grinding together, perhaps as they tried to slip past each other.

But that was then, and this is now, Thursday night about 10PM. I looked at the webcam just a few moments ago, and caught the sight of incandescence from the vent flaring over the rim of the caldera, over 250 feet high! It was HUGE! And if last night was bright, this was positively fiery! And it is continuing as I write this.

See for yourself in four views from the USGS webcam which I enhanced (all rights retained by USGS, of course). The first is a day view from January. The second is the same day view, with a night view from April sandwiched on top of it so you can see the scale of the plume at night.

 

The third is a day view I caught yesterday, Wednesday, during an ash episode that was turning the plume reddish brown. Notice how much bigger the vent is.

Now take a look at the fourth view, with tonight’s incandescent flare sandwiched on top of it.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll just let the picture say it all.

Emissions were up again Wednesday, and I’m guessing that Thursday they went up further. Vog was very heavy before and after the rain this evening. From all the sneezing and coughing I’m hearing when I go into town, the components of the ash, and whatever else is coming out now is significantly impacting people. The waiting room at Kaiser is constantly filled, with many or most of the people apparently suffering respiratory problems, from the sound of them.

But the show at Halema’uma’u continues to get more and more amazing, and we are all looking forward to the next change, whatever it will be.