I think prepare to be impressed. The USGS made a mini-movie of the ash event of 3:40 PM Wednesday afternoon, which I mentioned in the previous post. I appended the comment ‘Ho hum’. That was really an unfortunate choice of words, but one gets use to things. My grandmother used to say that a person […]

Here at the outset, let me say that the size of the explosive event today, Thursday, August 21, was nothing even approaching the cataclysmic outburst of 1924. But it was significantly different from the tiny belches we’ve been seeing off and on for months.
First, a little recent history. Tuesday afternoon, at 2:48, 2:57 and 4:08, […]

A minor item, but a bit of fun. The roar of the vent at Halema’uma’u can now sometimes be heard as far away as the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and adjoining Jagger Museum, both of which overlook the rim of Kilauea Caldera, approximately one and a quarter miles NNW of the vent. There is a deck […]

My prediction in the previous post that things would change was so wrong. And yet so right. The unusual change was… no change at all for a while. The last week at Halema’uma’u has been relatively uneventful, which is why there have been no posts on the uneventfulness. There has been just the usual white […]

I’m so sorry. But did you ever watch a candle that had been burning quietly and brightly and normally, and all of a sudden, it went into a crazed 1960’s era strobe dance where bright light alternated with almost going out and it went ‘whoomp… whoomp… whoomp’, very softly, to be sure, but still a […]

Yesterday morning at about 9:30, the vent at Halema’uma’u coughed up a dense brown cloud for several minutes. It happened at the same time as a hybrid earthquake. A hybrid earthquake?
Well, that was a new one for me, so I looked up the definition. The definition, translated to some approximate version of English, is that […]

As promised, the other three cooling, summertime Kona Coffee recipes.
Kona Coffee Blue Rock Cooler
Here in Kona, lava cools in many different ways. The kind that looks like crinkled chocolate is called A’a (ah-ah). Also called ‘cinder lava’, it can be rough enough and sharp enough to score the soles of hiking boots. Second kind […]

And now for something completely different.
Let us turn away for the moment from the steam rising from the volcano, and toward the steam rising from that pot of Kona Coffee you might have brewing. Is it hot where you are? It certainly is a hot evening here in the citadel of summer, Kona Hawaii. […]

Last night there were two ‘explosion-like seismic signals’ among a relatively large volume of small-earthquake activity beneath the Halema’uma’u vent.
There were also episodes where the currently very weak incandescence of the plume dimmed or winked out. That could have been caused by the earthquakes and accompanying rockslides, or was a result of fog and/or low […]

More precisely, the Big Island of Hawaii is a natural disaster area, which I suppose is a step up from an unnatural disaster area. Even better, we are a primary natural disaster area. Frankly, I do not know exactly what that last part means, but it certainly seems more important than, say, a secondary natural […]