i like it liquid hot: magma and me

Saturday, March 24, 2007

i feel . . . cold

Similar to Captain Barbosa, one does not physically feel sensations when camping on Mauna Loa. The overwhelming feeling is fatigue but hunger and thirst do not register. There is no desire to eat or drink but you are reminded of the need to when your body starts to give out. For someone like myself who loves eating, this sensation is unexpected and surprising.

We headed up at 5 am on Tuesday, arriving at our campsite at 9 am after being delayed by a hospital helicopter picking up a patient after an accident at 7 am. In an effort to finish Jamal's GPS mapping project, the summit caldera was separated in to a 300 m grid plus 3 East-West lines at 100 m points. What this means is that at every 300 and 100 m mark, we use the GPS to take a 2 minute survey reading of the elevation and exact longitude and latitude. Jamal can then compare the numbers to previous surveys to see if the caldera is deforming as well as analyze Frank's theory regarding the location of the shallow magma chamber and feeder dike.

The caldera is about 5 km long and 2 km wide and takes ~ 2 hours to hike at a steady rate. Tuesday we hiked out about 3/4 of the way and collected data until around 4 pm. Kelly and I were back in the SW corner and basically had to sprint hike back to get to camp before the sunset. Wednesday was a much more rigorous hiking day, since we were surveying the far end of the caldera and started hiking at 8:30 am. Wednesday the three of us walked all over the entire caldera and found a plethora of goodies - bagel, light bulb, dead bird, dead bug, old surveying equipment, glasses.

The combined weight of backpack containing water, food, rain jacket, first aid kit, walkie talkie, extra batteries, GPS battery plus the GPS unit is around 25-30 lbs. Carrying the GPS is awkward and I have bruises on my shoulders, chest and have a spot on my neck that was rubbed raw. I was fortunate enough to stay on my feet the whole time, but Kelly and Jamal both fell down in the a`a` and fell through the pahoehoe, up to their waists at times. Overall, we hiked ~17 miles and managed to finish Jamal's project. The weather was so beautiful on Wednesday that when we finished at 2:30, we took our time hiking back and enjoyed mini-naps in the sun every km.

Spatter ramparts! We camped near some red ones along the trail. They stretch out NE from the 1940 cone.

Jamal on the trek to find his GPS battery. The battery weighs ~10 lbs, so we left them in the middle of the caldera overnight to save our backs.

Standing on a collapsed slope in the SW corner of the caldera. Our camp is located at the NE tip. Do not want to be around when those huge chunks of wall come crashing down. Here is a google map link to the summit of Mauna Loa.


Ooohh. I am pressing start. In two minutes, I will press stop. The device has a leveling bubble that needs to be centered using the orange bipod legs.

A fissure! It was rather smelly - fumes of volcanic gases are unpleasant. Speaking of, last week we had dangerous levels of carbon dioxide and SO2 at the Observatory, so our lungs were tested for CO2 output. All of the interns tested as "heavy smokers"! Not good.


Tilted shot of the collapsed slope and wall. Facing South.

Friday, March 09, 2007

action shots!

Taking gas samples in Halemaomao, the crater of Kilauea. Measured CO2 plus temperature - around 90 C! Gas masks are essential to avoid the "vog" but the temperatures are so hot that you start to sweat inside. Gross

All of my Mauna Loa gear - GPS, walkie talkie, giant palm pilot, really cool hat and 10' water hose. Getting anything out of my backpack is an ordeal.


Entering data! Although having the palm pilot makes recording data in the office easier, it has become a pain in the field. Batteries have limited life (~ 3 hours) plus more than once all my data has been randomly erased.

So I lost the pointy end of my bipods of the GPS unit in the middle of Mokua`weo`weo, caldera of Mauna Loa - black on black, almost impossible to find. Kelly and I hiked out the next day and searched a 600 m traverse to find them. I was giving up hope and started to imagine how much trouble I would be in (replacing them would cost hundreds) when I basically tripped over the pieces! Phew, disaster avoided.

Our new campsite - right in the middle of the road. The road is gated and only available to HVO staff, so we do not have to worry about blocking any traffic since we are the only people who drive up. Our truck, Frank the Tank (named after our boss and Old School) is such a beast that when driving down the mountain Kelly did not use any gas for half the trip. The 4-wheel drive is so powerful that it just pulls itself up the hills.

Friday, March 02, 2007

the most hilariously bad Mauna Loa trip

Last week (2/21 - 2/23) the three of us headed back up to Mauna Loa to try to finish off the data collection stage of my project. We had 13 field areas to cover and feared that the weather would not hold and come sweeping in from the SW to cover us in fog and rain.

Within the first few hours, things started to go downhill. Kelly and Jamal each have a hand-held GPS unit with the grid coordinates already uploaded and labeled so they can just click "go to" and get the bearing and distance to their next point. Kelly was the first to notice that instead of her distance to walk being 20 - 100 m, it was around 7368374 km. Turns out the points had not been "projected" within the correct global units and were plotting, basically, in random space. My palm pilot had the correct points on it, so I was able to give them the correct coordinates and they could manually enter the points. This, unfortunately, sapped my battery power and required us to stay up late in the tent typing in numbers. A`a` on the left and pahoehoe on the right


The next morning, after sleeping in -4 C, was crisp and clear and we headed up to the summit, with well wishes of "Happy Counting!". I managed to walk directly in to a hole and twist my ankle. Despite my best efforts, I managed to fall over like a lumbering rhinoceros with all my gear flailing behind me. Basically, hiking on pahoehoe and a`a` is like using a stairmaster, so an ankle injury makes one almost useless. I hiked on it for about 4 hours, stopping once to get an ACE wrap from Kelly, until lunch time. Lunch came conveniently when all 3 of my spare batteries for the palm pilot died and I finished the last point in my field area. During a lunch time conference (hmm, cold soup), we decided that I would go pack up the car while they did another field area and then head home early.

My cankle! groovy


When I was about 100 m from the car, I noticed that our tent was not where we left it this morning. Instead of zipping up the doors, we had left them wide open, giving the wind a perfect opportunity to steal it. I located it quite a distance downhill, upside down, with all the sleeping bags (5 of them), ipod and speakers, littered on the ground. Took me some fancy maneuvering and careful placement of rocks, to prevent the tent from blowing away again, before everything was put back in their place and the car packed. At this point I radioed Kelly and Jamal to tell them the car was packed and that a blanket of fog was approaching from the saddle between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. Kelly then informed me that she could no longer see the car and that they were heading back now before it got too bad.

The prefect end to our camping trip gone awry came as we drove down in a hail storm. Yes, HAIL, for 40 minutes, in Hawaii. What?

This week has been spent in the office since its snowing and foggy on the summit but next week we are starting the first stage of Jamal's GPS project.