 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Okay, research in Minoa on a given Monday at the one o'clock block. We like, you know, week after week, we continue this great discussion about SOAS, the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology, and HIGP, the Hawaii Institute of Physics and Planetology, and we keep going. And one of the names that keeps popping up is Scott Rowland. And now, today, he's here with us. I am. Scott is in the faculty of SOAS. He's in the Department of Geophysics, what is it, Geology and Geophysics at SOAS. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thank you. So we want to talk to you about what's going on in the eruption, and we want to divide the show in two parts. The first is, what's been going on, how is it now? And the second part is, what's going to happen? We like, we know how much geophysicists like to predict things. Right. Well, I'm a geologist, not a geophysicist. Sorry. So I can't, maybe I won't predict. We know the difference anyway. All right. Certainly. I will do my best to catch you up and give you a sense of what can happen, and I'm not going to predict what will happen. OK. So let's talk about what has happened and where we are now. And by the way, we have this great background, this background, USGS, the United States Geological Survey. That's correct. And like NASA, NASA, they give these great pictures. They're the original of the USGS picture, and we're using it as a background today. And it makes me feel hot just sitting here at the table with you, Scott. OK. I won't touch that comment. All the information that I know about the eruption comes from the USGS. They have done an excellent job of putting photos, maps, graphs, diagrams, discussions online in near real time. Sometimes they will post their photos from their early morning helicopter flight probably within half an hour of the helicopter landing. So if I go up there, I'm likely to meet somebody from USGS. I don't know about that. They're out in the field, and regular folks aren't allowed in there. If you were a resident of the area, you certainly would meet the USGS folks. But just wandering around outside, probably not. You might see them fly by on a helicopter. Have you been around there? I went over a couple weeks ago, almost three weeks ago now, to go on a helicopter tour and got rained out. Oh, no! Yes. So the weather doesn't help sometimes. For the last couple weeks, the eruption has been relatively stable, as in the same thing is going on. It's still very dramatic, but there have not been big changes. And it's still essentially a story of two eruptions, one down in Puna, within Leilani estates. That's where the vent is. And the lava flow is about 13 kilometers long, about eight miles long, heads off to the northeast and east and enters the ocean at what used to be Capojo. And it was just about two weeks ago that those homes, a pretty horrible event of all those homes being covered by lava as the lava entered the ocean. But that flow has been very, very stable, and it's maintained the same channel since then, with minimal overflows. So it's a very stable channel, and the lava has been pouring into the ocean ever since at a relatively high rate for Kilauea, that the USGS posted a notice on their Facebook page that they've estimated that the output is something like 100 cubic meters per second. Wow. And then it builds the land. It builds what's behind us on the back, on the back right back. That's correct. It's entering the ocean and building out the land. It hasn't built out a lot of land yet, but the water is relatively, the offshore slopes there are relatively gradual. What's this picture? This is an image that one of my colleagues took from one of these helicopter tours, and underneath that steam plume is what used to be Capojo and Capojo vacation lands, the subdivisions, and Capojo Bay, which is now completely filled. All that steam comes from the interaction of the hot lava entering the ocean. And it's built out some land. You see that very jagged peninsula of dark rock just beyond the steam plume. That's new land, as of a couple of weeks ago. And the USGS reports, in most of their morning reports, that they can see a big area of upwelling water offshore, which is an indication that the lava flow is flowing underwater, and it's not too far down. So if this continues, it's going to certainly be building out. Is there a drop-off out there? There is, but unlike where lava went into the ocean for many years from the Pueblo oil flows, it's much less steep here at Capojo. And so as long as it keeps flowing into the ocean at the same place, it's going to be much more likely to build out that land. It does drop off well offshore eventually. So yes. So that land would be, right at the ocean, relatively, it would be a slight incline going up toward the mountain as the lava comes down. Is it ready? Is that land that's been created? Is it ready for me to build my new house? Build your house on? Well, I think it's going to belong to the state if it's new. If it buries someone's land, someone's private land, they still own that lot. That's still theirs. But anything new belongs to the state. I mean, like the accretion part, the part that's out in the ocean. That wouldn't belong to them if they had the coastal land to start with. As I understand it, that's correct. That new land belongs to the state. If it enters the ocean in the National Park, it belongs to the National Park. Very interesting. That's right. So, I mean, at this rate of flow, we are actually increasing the land mass at a significant rate, then. Certainly, although when we take a look at some of the photos in a moment, we'll see where this is kind of coming from. If you go to the next slide from the one that was just shown. So, this is a USGS photo that they posted yesterday. And kind of off in the distance, you can barely make out the active channel. So, if you look from where the big steamplume is, follow back to the right. You can make out a little bit of an orange color. That's the active lava channel entering the ocean. And all that black land in front of us is the new land that's been produced. But clearly, this all has to come from somewhere. And that's the second part of the story, namely, up at the summit of Kilauea. As magma leaves the summit storage chamber, it is, the summit is deflating and collapsing. Hale Maumau has increased in size by almost two times and gotten much deeper than it was just a month and a half ago. And so, all of that magma that's traveling down the East Drift Zone, erupting into the ocean to make new land, that had to come from somewhere. And basically, we're losing volume up at the summit in order to gain it down here at the coast. You sound so matter-of-fact about it. All your geology people sound so matter-of-fact about it, because you're so excited about the science of it. Well, yeah. But in fact, you know, this is doing violence to our land, isn't it? Well, it's, you're absolutely right. We always have to keep in mind that some 500 homes have been destroyed by this eruption since a month and a half or so ago, which weighs on all of us heavily. I don't think anybody would deny the fact we'd much rather none of this happened and all those folks had their homes back. So that excitement of what's going on, being able to watch these processes, it's tainted heavily by knowing there's that loss of property. It's a mixed bag. Absolutely. Oh, that's absolutely the case. That's right. So let's see another picture. Okay. Here's one of the maps that the USGS posts almost daily. The pink color is the new lava as of May 4th or May 3rd, I think. The purple flows are older lava flows. And since about three weeks ago, a little over three weeks ago, vent number eight, just below the words Leilani Estates, has been the source of all the lava flows down in Puna. And that dashed line shows the line of the lava channel and it goes to the northeast, then it swings over to the east and makes kind of a right angle turn to the south and then another right angle turn to the east and enters the ocean were over where it says active ocean entries. And the map actually hasn't changed a whole lot in the last couple of weeks. Let's go to the next one. So if you knew where the underground passed the plumbing, the volcanic plumbing was, say five years ago, then I suppose, at least to some extent, you could predict where the magma would go in that plumbing and where it would pop up in that plumbing and what the flow would be now. So you're partly correct. We certainly know where the plumbing system is, because we know where eruptions have taken place in the past. That's why we go out and map volcanoes to see where previous eruptions have taken place. Using sonar or something. No, just using our eyes, walking around, walking around. So there are very good geologic maps of lower Puna that were produced back in the early 90s by Frank Trusdell and Richard Moore at USGS. And there were maps prior to that as well. And so by looking at those maps, you can tell that eruptions have occurred along the east rift zone hundreds of times probably in the geologic past. And you can see where the lava flows go. So we know where the plumbing system is. We also know that from tracking earthquakes, both in the past and in the early part of this event, the thing that we really don't know until it happens is at what point is the magma going to stop propagating down rift and erupt at the surface? That's the big unknown. It's going down underneath. It's migrating through the rift zone plumbing system. You can't see that. Correct. You can trace the earthquakes. So every time as the magma moves, it has to push the rocks out of the way and sometimes break them. That's an earthquake. And that causes earthquakes. There's one this morning. So those earthquakes that are going on now are up at the summit. And that's the other part of this eruption, the holly moe moe increasing in size and parts of the caldera floor dropping and some explosions taking place up at the summit. So that's the other part of this eruption. And it produces these magnitude five to five and a half or so. It's pretty serious. They're pretty serious. They're kind of funny. They're reported in the press all the time as earthquakes. They are more explosions than earthquakes. And what the USGS is reporting is the equivalent earthquake size for that amount of explosive energy. It's certainly they shake the ground, but it's not as if there are big faults moving each time there is one of these explosions. So when they say it's a magnitude 5.5 or 5.3 or whatever, what they're mainly saying is that that particular explosion released the amount of energy equivalent to a 5.5 or 5.3. So if you don't know exactly when or where it's going to pop up from the plumbing. Correct. How do we determine a sort of a boundary where the average show should not be walking? Once the magma is migrating down the rift zone, such as it was the very first week of May, as it starts to approach the surface, it needs to push the rocks out of the way. And what you start noticing are cracks on the ground. And certainly May 2nd, 3rd and 4th in Leilani Estates, ground cracks were reported. Fissure. Fissures. Little ones. Yes. Yes. Well, some of them were pretty good size. Good to fall in. If you were being very careless, you could. But you know, especially across the road, they're super obvious. In the forest, where it's a lot harder to see things, you could conceivably fall into one of them. Once they get wide. By the time that happens, it's telling you that magma is starting to come closer to the surface. And it's a pretty good bet that if there is going to be an eruption, it's going to be in that region where the ground cracks are. So, as somebody doing that, it's like USGS? Oh, certainly. Once the earthquakes became, the other thing that happens is that the earthquakes start to get much more frequent in that same locality. And so very early in May, the earthquakes became really numerous in Lailania States. They were really shallow. People could actually hear them. The ground started to crack. And then earthquakes weren't really getting much farther downrift from that. And so it seemed as if the magma was starting to decide, for whatever reason, that this is the place where it's going to start accumulating. There have been cases in the past where magma has migrated down the rift zone and not erupted at all. Either just stayed there or continued on down to perhaps erupt underwater. So until the magma actually starts coming out of the ground, you're not 100% certain that there's even going to be an eruption. But certainly once you start getting a bunch of ground cracks, that's a pretty good sign that likely there will be one. So I know this is a very broad question, but I'd like to ask it and see what you say. Why is this eruption different? I think from the geologist's perspective, the reason this eruption is different is that we've got simultaneous flank activity down on the rift zone and summit activity up at Kilauea Caldera. We've seen each of those separately in the recent geologic past. Flank activity in 1955 and 1960. Summit activity 1924 and to a little extent 1960. But to have them going on at the same time, not that anyone thought that could never happen. It's just in our geologic career lifetimes, we have not seen those two events going on simultaneously. I think that's what's been interesting. It's a broader involvement. Yes, more things happen. You really get to see the connection between where the magma is coming from and where it's going. One more thing before we go to our break is I know Pune geothermal venture, not far. I don't know how far it is. And I wonder if you could connect up what you've been talking about with what happened, what did happen. I'm not sure what did happen at Pune geothermal venture. Pune geothermal shut down their production very soon after the earthquake started to localize in Laelani Estates. They're about a mile away from the center of that subdivision. It's pretty close. That's pretty close. I mean, the whole reason why Pune geothermal is there is because it's on the rift zone. That's where the hot geothermal waters are. So if you're going to build a geothermal plant, it totally makes sense to put it there. You want it there. Sure. It makes it much more efficient. That's right. And so they moved off-site a whole bunch of pentane, which is part of their energy production process. They moved that closer to Kilo. And they filled, as I understand it, they filled all their wells, their geothermal wells, with cold water, and then put big metal caps on top of them. What's the point of that? I think the worry was, and this is speculation, the worry was that lava might somehow get down into the bottom of those wells, interact with the geothermal waters, and release hydrogen sulfide. Like an explosion. I don't know if it would be an explosion or not. That's beyond my expertise. OK. And so the lava flows have covered a couple of those well heads. Maybe about three, four weeks ago, and then flows haven't entered that area where the wells are ever since ever since then. Much of the geothermal plant, their facilities, are on a little hill, and that hill has protected them from being buried by lava. They're kind of surrounded, but they're not being buried. This may be beyond where you've looked, but I wonder if the steps taken, and the natural, you know, natural processes that have happened around Poonergy and Thermal Venture make it really difficult to start it up again. That is beyond my expertise. I don't know if... My guess is it's going to be more a political question than an engineering question. I mean, in order to drill those wells, they drilled through lava flows in the first place. They know where the wells are, and it seems to me, even if they get more of them buried, if they wanted to, they could drill through the new lava and find the same one. I'm guessing. I don't know if that's sure, but I think it's going to be more a political question or an economic question than a engineering feasibility one. Right. Okay, that's Scott Rowland. We're talking about the eruption in Kilauea and the Lailania states down below, and we've talked about where it is now, what has happened so far. When we come back from this break, we're going to take the opportunity to talk about what's going to happen later on this thing and how this will integrate with the natural seismic process in that area. Oh, I'm so interested, Scott. We'll be right back after this short. Hey, that's you. I want to know will you watch my show? I hope you do. It's on Tuesdays at one o'clock, and it's out of the comfort zone, and I'll be your host, R.E.B. Kelly. See you there. Hey, Aloha. Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii, where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy and transportation, energy and maritime, energy and aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show, but we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Stan Energyman, and take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii. Aloha. Okay, we're back. We're live with Scott Rowland. He's a professor of geology and geophysics in the Geology and Geophysics Department at SOES, the School of Ocean and Earth Science at UH Minoa. And he's here to talk about the eruption, the continuing eruption. Oh, one killer whale. That's really important. So you had more pictures. Let's look at them before we get to the question of what's going to happen now. All right. This is a thermal image, and the USGS have been posting knees almost daily as well. The background, the color part is a satellite image, such as one would get from Google Earth. And then superimposed on that, that black and white part is a thermal image collected from a number of photographs, thermal images from a helicopter. And in that thermal part of the image, the white is hot and the black is dark. And you can see the active lava channel very, very distinctly in that portion of the image. And if you go to the next slide, it's just a close-up. And these thermal images are remarkable. This is the first time that one of these big lava channels feeding on lava flow has been imaged, at least in Hawaii, from one of these thermal cameras. And there's so much information here about the shapes of the channel, the shapes of the lobes, where heat's being lost, and so on. I find it interesting that it's so thin compared to the larger depiction of the lava. Sure. That has a lot to do with how it was controlled by topography when the flow was first in place about two and a half weeks ago. What are the black spots in the middle of the flow? Those are little islands of non-moving lava. And so if not an island, you could stand on, but there are definitely cooler islands inside that channel. Yes. Okay. Let's move to the next so we can see the summit. All right. So the other part of the story is the enlargement of Halimahu, which most people will remember, is the crater within the caldera of Kilauea. And the USGS posted this pair of photographs, one from mid-May and then one from the second week of June. And if you go to the next slide, what I've done is add a couple of lines. The yellow lines start at the far left and far right edges of Halimahu in the May 19th image, and I drop them straight down to the June 13th image. And you can see how much the crater has enlarged off to the right and off to the left. And in fact, it's even bigger than that now. So as magma leaves the summit storage system in Kilauea, basically support is lost and the floor of Halimahu is dropping because there's material being lost. Is that finished? I don't think so. It's still going on. If you go to the next slide, this is a comparison of, these are what are called shaded relief images. So it's the topography of the Halimahu Moe. And the image on the left was collected in the early 2000s, 2005 actually, or 2003, I think, by Pete McGinnis-Mark, who usually hosts this show. That's sort of pre all of this activity going on. And then over on the right is a June 8th image showing, and these are at the same scale, showing how big Halimahu Moe had become by June 8th. And again, this is outdated, the northeast part, where it looks relatively flat outside of Halimahu Moe. Much of that has collapsed in since June 8th. So it's much, much deeper and it's much bigger in diameter now. Estimate, if I stood on the rim, the new rim, the rim today in the right-hand side, and I looked down into that shadowed area, how far would the drop be before I got to the bottom of the depressed area? I believe it's almost 300 meters. 900 feet. 900 feet, 1,000 feet. That's a long way. That's a big hole. It really is. And prior to that, it was about 85 meters to the bottom. Wow, what a change. So it's three times as deep as it was just a month and a half ago. And it could be more before we're done. Yes, if you go to the next picture, I think it's a photo from a helicopter showing, you know, they flew by and collected just photographs and video of this. And over on the left, you can barely make out kind of a striped pattern, kind of running from lower left to upper right and disappearing under some steam. That's the old Halimahu Moe parking lot. And if you had gone to Halimahu Moe 11 years ago, you could have parked right there and hiked on a small trail, which has now largely fallen into the crater and looked down into Halimahu Moe. So things have changed enormously up there at the summit. So where is the volcano house with respect to all of this? Off to the, actually behind us in this view. So it would be behind us. Is it at risk? There's a long way from the edge of Halimahu Moe, even the new one, to the volcano house. So at the moment, it's fine. And it's closed, and it gets a good shake every time there's an explosion. But I have not heard of any reports of damage at the volcano house. That would be a loss if that crashed into the crater. I agree. It would, I agree. Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to go up there. There's a lot of history. Yeah, a lot of history, yeah. Okay, what else we got? Okay, and then this is a photo from the Volcano Observatory, from HVO, looking out the window. Now we're looking more or less south across to the right is the main pit of Halimahu Moe. And you can sort of see a shelf. It drops from the level of the caldera off to the left, down a big step. And then at the edge of that steam over on the right, it drops down into the main pit. And that step that joins the far left to the far right formed in about a week or so. And those of us who look at these webcam images all the time, could more or less follow this thing happening. And the USGS posted, they've got a live video feed and they managed, they found the footage that caught this, not forming the whole thing, but increasing in size a little bit. And you can watch the camera shake a little bit. There's an earthquake. And then you can see off in the distance. It's a little hard to tell because of all the steam. You can see that whole shelf just dropped down a little bit. So people are going to be using these film clips and the data for years to try to analyze what really happened. You know, huge things happen. That's exactly right. And as someone who in the past has used reports like this to study older eruptions, the careful day-to-day monitoring of events at the summit, how fast lava flows are erupting, when they cross this road or this road or this road, that stuff is so valuable for trying to piece back together an eruption, a past eruption. So, you know, we owe a lot to the USGS folks who are putting in long hours to make all of these measurements. Well, they're geologists. It's just like you, aren't they? They are. They are fascinated with what's going on. They are indeed. That's right. We've got one more picture. Let's take a look at that. I think there's, okay. These are radar images collected from an Italian satellite, just sort of showing a time series of how Halimaumau has increased in size and how new fractures are forming in and around the vicinity of Halimaumau. And again, these are online and they have them arranged as sort of a time series, like a time-lapse sequence. And the link is down there. It's worth clicking on that to look at that. And there's, again, a huge amount of information here that's available. Well, that's, you know, I wanted to get to that. So, we learned a lot, because we have instruments now. We didn't have a few years ago. Sure. This is a really big eruption for Hawaii. And I wonder what we have learned that would take us forward to understand, you know, when this is going to end and when it's going to begin again. Right. Well, when it's going to end is the question that I've been asked many times and the folks at the big island have been asked many times as well. I don't have an answer. One can look at past eruptions and compare the volume that's been erupted so far today to eruptions in the past. And I'm afraid I don't have those numbers in my head, but I believe the eruption at Kapoho in 1960 produced a slightly more lava that then has been erupted to date. The current one may have passed it just in the last few days. When I checked previously it had, you know, it had not gone that far. So that's one thing. You can just say, okay, we can look at all the past eruptions in this area, how what their volume is. How does this one compare? We have somewhat of an idea of how much magma can be stored in the summit magma chamber. And that's based on geophysical measurements over the decades. It's based on some geochemical arguments of looking at the magma compositions and how much they evolve. And if you know how much they evolve, you have kind of a sense of how big the volume must be. And so we can compare the total amount that's been erupted to that total storage amount. And when is it going to quote unquote empty out? As far as I know, the USGS thinks that there is still magma coming into the volcano from the hotspot. So it's not as if it's just emptying. There is, I believe, there is still supply coming in. So that's the kind of, I don't want to call them games, but that's the type of thinking that people are doing to try and understand when this may stop. You can look just at photographs of the lava fountain. Two weeks ago, the lava fountain down in Laelani Estates was pretty consistently 200, 250 feet high. Now it's more 150, 180 or so. So it's dropped down a little bit. I don't know how the effusion rate has changed, but it's definitely not quite as high of a fountain. That doesn't necessarily mean there's less coming out. It just means it's not being, the gas is not expanding it quite as high as it was before. Putting all of those things together is what people are trying to do to get some sense of what the future of this is going to be. I don't think anyone is going to stick their neck out and say a day and an hour and a minute or maybe even a week for when it's going to stop. Because I just don't think we have enough ability to know that very, very well. I'll stick my neck out. Okay. And I'll say yes, but it will stop, won't it? It will stop eventually. That is correct. So you can get someone to take that bet. No bet there. Well, does this mean your classes are filling up? Everybody wants to hear from you about this? I hope so. I hope that the eruption in the news is something that will make people interested in what's going on. I mean, we really want people, not just on the Big Island, but everywhere. We want regular folks when they're outside at the beach or hiking or whatever to look at the rocks, look at the soil, look at the cliffs, look at the coastline and learn that kind of stuff. This is part of being in touch with the environment. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's part of being an informed citizen. So that if a law gets passed that has some effect on where you can or cannot build or things like that, the more people who understand whether such a law is a good idea or not such a good idea, the better off we are. We want regular folks to understand the natural world, biological as well. Better because it makes for a more informed citizenry. The whole world. That's right. That's right. And so that's our job at the university is to encourage that, give them that background knowledge and then send them out there with that knowledge so they can start making their own observation. Thank you, Scott Rowland. You're very welcome. Great to have you on the show. My pleasure.