Hanzo!!! Kilauea's Erupting (discussion thread)

Me, I plan on watching the spectacle with a cold adult beverage in my hand. Hopefully from a distance with the wind at my back.

But, that is only if the Ring of Fire becomes active....

 

Hint: "The Ring of Fire" is ALWAYS active....

 

I meant the whole thing going off... I have somewhat of a ring side seat!

Rainier, Hood, St. Helens, Jefferson, Sisters, Shasta

 

Nope. Possible, but not likely. No mega tsunami to end the world just yet, unfortunately. Maybe a small chunk, but nothing incredible.

 

Tsunami run at about 500 or so mph, takes as long to cross the ocean as a commercial jet. Plus, they follow the inverse square law when it comes to intensity. (Radio comms are faster, maybe even faster than brain waves, certainly faster than mine.) The problem comes when the wave gets into relatively shallow waters. Conventional "wisdom" says that Kilauea can't affect California or AK anyway, so CNN will scream that the sky is falling, then whimper.

 

Fill up the bath tub about half way. Take a board, basket, or something flat that will fit most of the width and stand or press down quickly. Of course, be very careful not to fall or slip and hurt yourself. The water should press away at a rapid pace without slowing until it hits the opposite side.

The main concern with a Tsunami is usually not those living on a distant coastline, but those within early reach and those locally who often must deal with the accompanying seismic activity. Also, when such a large chunk of island does slip off, it will push water away from the main island which precipitated the slide, and what goes out will come back with a vengeance. This is just the basics of a tsunami, I am no expert, but I am confident enough to say that Hawaii is too far away for any of its activity to significantly harm the Western seaboard of the U.S. directly, would pose a minor threat to the Marshall Islands and thereabouts if the tsunami were directed there (which it isn't due to the facing side of Kilauea), next would be Mexico and that's about 2,000 miles or more across open ocean with crossing currents. The most damage I have surmised to take place would be caused due to volcanic ash in the atmosphere, and much of that's dependent upon wind patterns, but could ultimately affect much of the world as would any major eruption. But, the locals of the Hawaiian islands would not fare well in any large event.

A lot of the stuff we see from media sources is pure fear and chicken little rhetoric based on worse case "what if" and sometimes completely fallacious garble.

 

It's getting dangerous and some folks just don't know not to piss on the electric fence...

Hawaii volcano activity prompts new threats as man seriously injured from lava spatter

A man was seriously injured when he was hit with lava spatter while standing on his third-floor balcony — the first known injury related to Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano eruptions as new volcanic activity creates new threats in surrounding neighborhoods.
The homeowner on Noni Farms Road in Pahoa was hit with lava on the shin and taken to the hospital with serious injuries, Janet Snyder, spokeswoman for the Office of the Mayor, told Reuters.
"It hit him on the shin, and shattered everything from there down on his leg," Snyder said, adding that the lava spatter could weigh “as much as a refrigerator.”

“And even small pieces of spatter can kill,” she said.

 

The impact on residents is heartbreaking... Hawaii lava evacuees grow weary as uncertainty drags on - Breitbart

PAHOA, Hawaii (AP) — Ed Arends grabbed what he could in the night and fled his 5-acre property, lava oozing from a crack in his neighborhood on Hawaii’s Big Island.
That was more than two weeks ago. He hasn’t been able to stay at his house since.
“It’s disconcerting not being home, being displaced,” Arends said. “I’m sleeping on a sofa in a guy’s living room.”

It’s not known whether lava flows will keep advancing or stop, and new flows are likely.
Steve Clapper stood in the rain outside a shelter where he and his mother have been staying since evacuating Leilani Estates. He sleeps in his truck with his dogs while his mother sleeps inside the shelter.
The uncertainty has made Clapper want to get his 88-year-old mother, who has dementia and is on oxygen, off the island.
“We don’t have any control over it, and this could go on for years,” he said.
Don Waguespack, who co-owns Cajun Paradise Farms down a hill from where fissures have opened, evacuated to a small hotel room on the opposite side of the island.
“We evacuated to Kona and felt so helpless over there, I think it was worse mentally for us than being here,” he said.
So Waguespack returned, relieved to find his home on his 10-acre property still standing.
Arends and his brother Mike Arends, who also evacuated from Leilani Estates, were grateful their houses were still safe.
“It’s pretty early to tell what’s going to happen, things change on almost a daily basis,” Ed Arends said.
Yet living out of bags, not knowing where your toothbrush might be at a given moment, is tiring and stressful for the brothers.
“It’s easy to go two or three days with it, but I think after two weeks, it grates on you a little bit,” Mike Arends said. “You start to get weaker, you start to get more tired, you’re not quite sleeping right, you’re not eating right.”

 

Yes, the volcanic ash can cut off breathing and muck everything up. At least it's not radioactive, though.

 

On the brighter side, it was pretty cool taking a brush-up lesson to refresh my memory about the Hawaiian Island chain. It's amazing how it's smack dab at the middle of the Pacific plate with this much activity, because most volcanic activity is along faults (the weak areas and breaks in the plates). The idea here is that the weak point in the upper mantle provides something much like a cavity for a lava lamp, known as a volcanic hotspot, and over time as the islands move with the plates, these deposits settle as the dormant islands they become, while new islands are formed, like the mainland of Hawaii. It's theorized that a very large blob could essentially erupt, and I gander it's probably between the time the active island breaks away and magma is erupting out onto the ocean floor making its plume before it establishes a firm new island that this may happen.

Like Hanzo said, in human terms it's millions of years between for these things to happen, but it would be pretty cool (and terrible at the same time) to actually witness a new island being formed. I imagine the seismic activity to be rather brutal during the main stages of this process, let alone the lava eruptions. In Google Earth satellite view, we can follow the deposits and track the plate movements and see the chain of deposits forming an underwater mountain range all the way up from Siberia. It's pretty cool, actually.

Plate loss gave chain of Pacific islands and seamounts a bend