 ThinkTek Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Research in Minoa. I'm Jay Fidel here. It is Monday at the one o'clock block. We have Andrea Gabrielli from the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, PhD. And we're going to talk about volcanoes, because it's all the rage. We've had volcanic eruption here in Kilauea, and the whole world is talking about it. You know that. Everyone, everywhere, talking about it. Everyone knows about it. It's in the news. People talk about it. We get messages all the time from people. Yeah. And then on top of that, the one in Guatemala, Fuego in Guatemala. That was quite remarkable. It should happen at the same time. And one of the questions I want to put to you, Andrea, is there a relationship here? Is the world having some kind of global exercise here, where they all happen at the same time? Maybe is this some kind of religious expression that we better watch out? Why? Don't worry, Jay. Don't worry. The two volcanoes, it's very remarkable, because both of them began erupting on June the 3rd. Although the big catastrophe with the pyroclastic flows on the volcano El Fuego in Guatemala was after that. But Kilauea also, the fissure eruptions in the lower Puna area started to open up the first fissures on June the 3rd as well. But the mechanisms of eruption and also the geological dynamics that fuel these eruptions are quite different. And we're going to talk about this today to try and do some contrast and comparison with these two. Very different, yet very interesting eruptions. It helped me with one thing. I just came back from Iceland. Wow. And Iceland is a volcanic island. It really is. And right down the middle of Iceland is a fissure. Everybody calls it a fissure. They all speak English. And on one side... Icelandic. You don't want to speak Icelandic. It's a language you've got, you know, stuck in amber in the year 2000 and hasn't changed. But anyway, so on the west side of the fissure, you can see the fissure. It runs north and south all through the... Absolutely. It's the North American plate. And on the east side of the fissure, it's the Eurasian plate. And you can see the two plates. More. You can put one foot on one plate, one foot on the other plate. And you can pretend to be both in North America and Europe. So I made note that I had to come back here and ask you exactly, what is a fissure? The fissure is... So that particular fissure, let's call it, that you are referring to in Iceland, is really the path of the mid-oceanic ridge, which is emerging from the ocean. Because this is basically the area of divergence, if you want, as you said, between the North American plate as well as the European plate. And so this is an area where magma upwells. There is an upwelling of magma. And so the continuous eruptions at this ridge, at this fissure, basically pulls away North America from Europe. They are separated. And that's why we refer... They are separating in the G7 right now. Never mind. We refer as this as the spreading. The Atlantic Ocean is really spreading and continuing to spread. We had various eruptions recently in Iceland. The Vatnajökull glacier, we had an eruption in 2014. A volcano called Bardarbunga began to erupt, creating fissures as well in the central part of Ireland, away from the Vatnajökull glacier. But also we had Eyjafjallajökull, or Grivoth, other volcano which erupted respectfully in 2010, 2011. And we are seeing this activity. This is the same activity that really separates and makes the Atlantic Ocean bigger. So I'm glad you were able to observe. Well, for a geologist, these are the best times. This is a geologist, a volcanologist delight right now, isn't it? Absolutely, absolutely. And Kilauea back here in Hawaii has also been erupting in the most recent time. We've observed on the news that the distractions of the towns of Kapo'ol in the Lower Puna area, about 600 homes have been destroyed. No loss of life. That's right. No loss of lives. And so this is related to the eruption behavior of Kilauea volcano. We have these long lava flows and the explosive activity at the summit due to groundwater interactions with the magma column. But the civil protection, civil agencies, they've been very good at keeping everybody away. The National Park is closed. But also with these lava flows, the hazards are less if you want, not in terms of the property, because these, you know, everything is destroyed. But in terms of human lives, you can walk away from even a fast moving lava flow. Whereas, for example, what happened in Guatemala where 109 people died and 300 more were injured. That's because here we're not talking about lava, but we're talking about a hot mixture of gases and rocks called pyroplastic flows, or pyroplastic density current, which can travel up to 700 kilometers per hour. So you don't really run out. So the difference is really remarkable between these two volcanoes. And if you want, in simple terms, lava from Kilauea is basically melted rock, very hot and melt material from the mantle down below, with a little bit of gas added to it. And that's what drives the lava fountains, for example, and everything. But then as soon as the lava erupts, the gases can escape. Guatemala one is different because it's less material, less volcanic material, less melt if you want, but more gases. And this material is also much more viscous. So the gases are not really being... They can't really escape from this melt. And as a result, since they can't escape, they accumulate and the result is much, much more explosive. That's right, explosive. Absolutely. And those pieces can hurt you. They're tiny pieces, but it's really the temperatures and the hot gases of this pyroclastic density, currents flows that can really, you know, kill and destroy everything that is in their path. Well, let's look at Kilauea. You have a bunch of photographs. We ought to go through them, yeah? Let's see maybe the first one. So, okay, this one is the most recent map that was available from the USGS from yesterday at 12 p.m. And you can see the extent of this lava flow field. Most of the activity right now is focused on Fissure 8, which is actually building up a cinder cone due to the eruption going on. And then you can see on this map that this Fissure 8 is feeding a channel that goes down all the way to what once was Kapoho Bay, and that's where there is the active ocean entry. The amount of magma or lava that has been discharged as part of this lower Puna eruption is 113.5 million cubic meters of lava, which is basically, if you think about the dump, the garbage trucks, you know, the size, you could fill up about 11.3 million trucks with that, the lava that has been discharged. I don't even know if we have that many trucks here on Oahu. I don't think we're not even close. Yeah, but still it seems pretty much a large amount, and it really is, but if you compare, for example, this amount of lava erupted as part of this episode, it's really half of the amount of lava that was erupted in 1984 by Mauna Loa volcano. So we're still talking about a lot of lava, but still half of what Mauna Loa erupted in 1984. That was the last big one here in Hawaii. For Mauna Loa volcano. And this is all part of Mauna Loa volcano, right? You say Kilauea, but it's really part of the same system, isn't it? Well, Kilauea and Mauna Loa are two separate volcanoes. So they have their own magma chambers and plumbing systems. But if you want, they are fed by the same mantle plume, which originates all of the Hawaiian islands. More pictures. Let's see another picture. Okay. This one is above, you can see a cartoon, a schematic, which was prepared by Professor Scott Rowland at the University of Hawaii. And this is really just to summarize what has been going on at the Kilauea volcano. We have an eruption going on in the lower part of the volcano, the Lailani Estates eruption. And this eruption is droning magma from the summit area. So the summit magma chamber, the whole summit is subsiding, meaning that the magma from the summit is moving down onto the East Drift Zone and being discharged in Puna. And this is, and you can see a picture on the right, USGS pictures on June the 9th, 2018. That's the Fisher 8th. Oh, yeah, just a couple of days ago. And that's what we were talking about, the Fisher 8th, that is feeding that lava channel that you can see coming out of the main vent. Now what we see in the bottom right picture, that lava, is that more liquid than viscous? I mean, what is that like, the consistency of it? It's like melt rock, but still with not very, not a lot of gases dissolved in it, so it doesn't explode. Yeah, and it doesn't move that quickly. And it moves fairly quick, yeah. You can out walk it though. Well, yeah, if it's in a channel like this one, for example, you can see it can retain the heat and it can travel very fast. Right now, we're seeing a high discharge rate as part of this eruption. It moves quite fast and it's feeding an ocean entry five kilometers down slope. So it's pretty intense. But the subsidence that I was mentioning before due to the eruption in Leilani Estates is also causing something very interesting that you can see on the bottom left picture. That was acquired on June the 6th and you might not even recognize it, but that's Halema Omao. The bottom dropped out. The crater on the summit caldera has dramatically changed. Dramatically changed. So you can see in the pictures, basically, the former lava lake has dropped. You can see the former bottom, but everything has changed dramatically and the entire northwestern rim of Halema Omao is sliding inward the crater. All the fractures and folds and the scars, basically, that you can see on the right-hand side of this picture. So it's really impressive. We're talking about millions of tons of lava here. There's a lot of material. It's very interesting to give numbers to this phenomenon that we're looking at. The subsidence at the summit was basically 1.5 meters, meaning that the whole volcano, the summit, basically, went down 1.5 meters as a result of this subsidence, as a result of magma moving from the summit reservoirs into the East Rift Zone and fueling the eruption in Puna. So as it drops down from the Halema Omao, then it sort of finds a way... Well, that first chart, the top left, it finds a way elsewhere and comes out and forms a river that goes down to the ocean. That's the lava that dropped out of Halema Omao. Halema Omao, and it's going underground, basically, into the plumbing system of the volcano. It emerges in Puna at the Fisher 8 and then it continues down the Rift Zone. But let's talk a little bit more about these dramatic changes at Halema Omao, as I believe we have another picture that we can see, maybe. So this is a mosaic that was put together by, again, Scott Rowland at the Department of Geology and Geophysics at UH Manoa. And on the left, there is a satellite picture of Halema Omao in 2000. This is a paper published by Pete Moghini's Mark and Harold Garbele, who are also at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. So you can see the circular shape. And then on the right, there is a U.S. GS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory drawn, acquired images, a series of images that pictures the new Halema Omao, how it changed. Just last week. Just like last week, June the 8th. And you can see these two pictures are the same scale. So you can see how, really, basically, the right, the eastern side of Halema Omao collapsed. But then you also see that the northwestern, so the left side in this picture of Halema Omao, resends all these scars and fractures because we are observing the sliding of this part of Halema Omao. And that photograph on the right, what's the dimension in miles? It's about 800 meters, the diameter, yeah. Half a mile. Yeah, but it grew a lot as part of this activity. And the subsidence of the main edifice of the volcano is causing a lot of earthquakes at the summit. So we are seeing, really, a lot of earthquakes. When we come back from this break, we're going to find out how you really feel about this as a geologist. What, you know, these are historical moments here in Hawaii. It makes it all worthwhile. We'll be right back with Andrea Gabrielli of HIGP to see more about what's happening not only in Kilauea, but in Guatemala as well and to compare them. We'll be right back. Hello, I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech Hawaii called Konnichiwa Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. Aloha. Living in this crazy world So far up in the confusion Nothing is making sense For the NUS Got the peace solution How to make a brighter day Of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology talking about two eruptions that have happened pretty much in the same week. They're quite amazing. And me, I was in Iceland looking at two years and a volcano there that actually Andrea has been. He's seen that as a geologist. He went to look. Anyway, so not all volcanoes are the same. Not all volcanic eruptions are the same and that makes it even more interesting to compare the live events that are happening here in Hawaii against the live events that are happening somewhere else and finding they're really very different. So tell us about Guatemala. Absolutely. The volcano, the Fuego is about 44 kilometers from Guatemala City. And so it's a strata volcano so much different from a shield volcano such as, for example, Kilauea or Mauna Loa or the volcanoes that we have here in Hawaii. And the material that fuels eruptions in this particular case is quite different and also the compositions in terms of gases and viscosity is also quite different and the results are also different. So maybe let's have a look at a picture that I have here. Okay, so on the top left you can see from the National Police of Guatemala you can see the Fuego volcano and you can see how different the shape is. It's much more pointy if you want than the nice slopey shields of Hawaiian volcanoes. What's in the foreground? Is that lava coming down? That's right. The one in the foreground is exactly what caused all the fatalities as part of this blast. It's really the deposits from a pyroclastic flow. A pyroclastic flow is a mixture of really hot gases and volcanic particles that travels down the volcano so you can see the scars on the edifice that went down at 700 kilometers per hour. So people, the villages nearby and there was a golf course there, they really didn't have a chance to... Well, I wanted to ask you about that. So if you see it coming down and it looks like it comes down kind of like water so you say to yourself it's coming this way, why don't I run that way? It's not like water. It's basically... It's like hot gases, really what you say heavy if you want that can flow somehow down the slopes of the volcano but we're talking about something huge, something really big. We're talking about in this particular case for Guatemala it's a volcanic column which you can see on the NASA image on the right. That's the top of the volcanic column. You can see Guatemala, you can see Mexico or the States and then you see the clouds are white but pretty much on the center you can see a black spot, sorry, sort of gray spot. That's basically the top of the ash column. Now this ash column was ejected or was blasted out the main vent of fuego, the fuego volcano and then it went up all the way to the stratosphere more than 12 miles high up into the air. That's huge. That's huge. That's 60,000 feet. That's right, but then because of the weight we're talking about the hot gases and rocks it basically collapsed and this is what volcanologists call as the collapsing fountaining. Basically all this gas, all this ash collapsed and started to flow down the slopes of the volcano inundating everything. But we don't... You can't run away. You can't run away. That's right. So you don't really see this kind of events in Hawaii but another thing that really happened in Guatemala was something called lahar. Now Guatemala was after this eruption all this ash and all this material, this volcanic material is loose. It's not attached to anything. So if it rains a lot basically all this material starts to get washed down the edifice of the volcano inundate valleys and villages in this case on the slopes. The water makes it flow then. Yeah, but this is not normal water. It's an Indonesian bahasa word lahar to indicate a mud flow basically. So it is really again really energetic because it comes down high speed but the water is also mixed with mud and so it's really viscous and it's much more devastating than just water because it can tear down walls. And some people also get trapped under this mud and when the flow, when the lahar flow stops it hardens, yeah? It gets hard. And people get trapped in there. So it is really... You can't punch your way through. If you're stuck in there, it's very difficult to... You're entombed. Entombed, that's right. But the mechanisms that if you want them even with all the distractions that we had in the Puna area, 600 homes lost. We remember lots of people. More than 2,000 people lost, had to be evacuated and shelters and everything. Nobody passed away. In Guatemala it was not the case as because of this much more hazardous scenario. And maybe we can have a look at the next slide so we can see a little bit more about the dynamics of them. This is now fuego again. On the left you can see the mechanism that is really fueling the fuego volcano. So we have the descending plate. Okay, we have a convergent margin here. So two tectonic plates are colliding. But what happens is that the denser one, the one that is less buoyant, sinks underneath. In this case you can see the continental one, the continental crust. Now this material as part of Guatemala for example was the oceanic crust that is going under the continental crust. And so this is material that has been soaked at the bottom of the ocean. It's been soaked in water for a very long time. So what happens as this material goes down, the water which is in it subjected to high pressures and temperature starts to melt, it basically gets really high temperatures. And these materials as well as hot sediments starts to migrate into the continental crust. So this is what they call it as diapyrus. And so this hot material from the descending oceanic plate can partially melt the continental crust. And so in the slide basically you can see that as this material rises, so here we're talking about continental crust that has been melt and rises again. But you see it's not... What color is that in the slide? The red dots that come out. That's the crust that has been melted. And what about the beige color on top of that? What is that? That's the lithosphere and the continental crust, the gray one as well. Okay, and then the green, is that ocean? The blue is ocean, the ocean over there. Then to the right that's the mountains. That's the mountain, the volcanic arc basically. And you can see the volcanic opening there. The main point here is that it's continental crust which is granitic which melts and then rises. So really high viscose contains a lot of gas, creates explosive eruptions. In Hawaii that's the right picture. So you can see there is a mantle plume so that's really hot. This is the orange stuff coming out. So the one on the left is fuego, the one on the right is kilauea? It's kilauea, yeah. It's the mechanisms of the Hawaiian volcanoes. So the one on the right, you can see this mantle plume, this buoyant material coming up. And then this material is the one that gets stored into the lithosphere, formed the magma chambers for kilauea, Mauna Loa and other volcanoes. And then it erupts. As the Pacific plate moves northwest then you have basically the hotspot is stationary but the plate is moving and so you have the chain of islands as much as the plate progresses. So it changes where things come up. Absolutely. But again the main point is Guatemala is, if you want little melt, little volcanic material with a lot of gas in it so makes it very explosive. Hawaii is a lot of melt, a lot of material, but with little gases in it. Gas makes the difference and makes it more dangerous. It's really the gas that makes the difference and so that's the difference between the two volcanoes but again two different mechanisms, two different volcanoes, different eruptions style but still disasters. So you mentioned before that you learn a lot when you have this confluence of events, seismic events around the world. What have you learned here in the last couple of weeks watching the eruptions in both places? Well we should mention that I am not part of... When I say you, I mean the research community. Because I am not part of the monitoring team. This is really the USGS that is doing a terrific job as well as Bruce Houghton from the University of Hawaii they're doing a terrific job for this. But this has been for Kilauea this has been a great occasion to learn more about the plumbing system of this volcano and really the structures of the two rift zones and how it really behaves. And so this is going to help in the future to understand more for example about lower rift zone eruptions or even some eruptions and draining of lava lakes and associated explosive activity at Hale Maomao. Because the last explosive event was 1924 at the summit. So really we are learning a lot as part of this. And Guatemala, that's really this really emphasizes again the hazards and the dangers associated with the volcanoes of the Ring of Fire. So the whole area around the Pacific where there is subduction and really we have this very explosive... Look at the large plates the ones that go thousands of miles those plates. Those that can create really explosive eruptions. So Fuego reminds us again of the hazards and the importance of volcanic studies and as well as monitoring developing new sensors such as what we try to do at UH Manoa for my group with Robert Wright for example who is the director of HIGP to try and really be more prepared and provide the early warnings for the populations to avoid natural disasters such as this one that we witnessed of Fuego and Guatemala. Yeah that would have been helpful well in both places but especially in Fuego save lives if they could have said exactly what was going to happen. So we don't really know these days yet exactly what's going to happen maybe in the future I suppose. We need as we said more sensors more observations as well because in these cases you really learn from observations and I believe and maybe we can just remember the website for the USGS the very last slide last slide so we can see yeah because the USGS particularly for Kilauea is doing an excellent job in keeping everybody posted about what's happening so that's the website that you may want to have a look at to have updates on pictures and videos and you know feedback on what's really happening on the big island. There it is Andrea Gabrielli HIGP The Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics and Panathology and the US Geological Survey Oh not me All working together All working together Thank you Andrea Thank you Jay Thank you Jay Thank you Thank you