06:58: Chopper 1 is returning from the morning lava recon. Here is a map here updated as of last evening:
And here is a picture from yesterday:
The morning report says the lava has advanced ~360 feet since yesterday. I assume that means from 12:15 pm yesterday which is the time indicated on the 6 October flow map but that’s not stated specifically.
Someone is doing it better than I am. I’ll refer you to that site for the official report. I’ll continue with the the occasional update.
http://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2014/10/06/morning-lava-flow-update-monday-october-6/
Chopper 1 was there three times today. The last time for over an hour, so the flow must have started a fire. When I looked, there were pictures:
You can click and enlarge them. The thermal photo is pretty interesting. The black spot near the top of it is where the flow stopped last week. The interesting part is that it isn’t ‘leaking’. The lava is coming on pretty strongly and it is absolutely possible that if the magma reserve doesn’t go down, it won’t stop. But at this point the front is only about 230 feet wide. That’s not a disaster by any means. Normal power poles are further apart than that. The BIG power poles out on the highway are further apart yet. A temporary bridge like the one up the Hamakua coast could easily span it. Water is distributed from both sides of Pahoa for people on county water. The rest of us are on catchment. No cell towers are threatened. It will be merely an inconvenience for a little while.
At the newest speed calculated by someone, not me, it could cross cemetary road in about two weeks. It is still possible for it to stop, or to veer off to the northeast…but in THIS picture, there are white-hot spots at the front of the flow.
It won’t stop as long as it is being fed magma that hot. It has one mile to go to the dump road and about 1.7 to Old Government Road.
Good news and bad news. The flow is speeding up. It has advanced ~600 yards since last Wednesday and is now moving at about 15 feet per hour. At it’s present speed and direction, it could cut Cemetary Road in just over two weeks.
The deflation is continuing at the vent, so it might well stop again – but you never know for sure. My little red dot yesterday was exactly correct, within feet. That spot has now been covered by the advance.
Helicopters are coming from all over. I just saw one from Maui and there have been a couple of local flights this morning already. There is at least one fixed-wing up right now. People are getting interested.
The FAA restriction for non-relief flights over the lava flow area continues.
Chopper 1 is surveying the flow at 13:20.
Just as ebola is being spread widely across the US, the government says that ebola can’t spread widely across the US.
We shouldn’t worry. We have the vaccine…right? Not exactly.
“Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Duncan is in critical condition, adding that the patient is not receiving ZMapp – an experimental medicine – because it is “all gone” and is “not going to be available anytime soon.”
So the people who are quarantined in hospitals with ebola are beginning to die from it. The problem with ebola is that you may have it and be contageous, but not show any symptoms for up to 21 days – or in rare cases, merely be a carrier and never contract the disease. Regardless what the government says, this is going to get about as close to Captain Trips as I care to imagine. Once it gets loose in a major county jail, there will be no possible way to even follow the spread which will immediately become exponential.
This is where the phrase “to go viral” comes from. Just like the flu, at some point everyone will be exposed to it.
So what is the big worry this month? Sleeper cells of ISIS jihadists. Before that? The evils of owning a firearm. Do you know what the real problem is?
The real problem is that everyone thinks THEIR problem is the most important problem. Their money. Their relationships. Their families. Their lives. But all of that is transient. We come and we go; we live and we die. And instead of leaving something good because it’s good, we want to be paid for doing the right thing – because we are worth it. No. We aren’t. Look at what we have left for all the future generations that will never exist because we had to have it all NOW. Because we cared for nothing but ourselves.
The map is usually updated every two days and the helicopter flew today (in addition to tour helicopters) but the map hasn’t been updated since the third. Quoting the HVO Kilauea update site, which was last updated at 08:15 this morning, “A Civil Defense overflight this morning observed that the flow front has advanced approximately 90 m (100 yards) since yesterday.”
Because the distances are approximate, and unless I am outside noting the time Chopper 1 flies over my house, I cannot calculate an accurate speed for the flow. It doesn’t matter much. If it keeps moving, the speed will become important. It could stop completely, or it could advance at three feet an hour, or it could get a hot rock injection and begin moving a little faster…say a mile an hour. If it started to speed up after the morning flight, it could theoretically get to Pahoa in a couple of hours instead of a couple of months. Wouldn’t THAT be interesting!
Anyway, they generally update the map every two days using the morning data, so we can assume it moved ~300 feet in ~24 hours. That means it has doubled it’s speed of advance since last week to about 12.5 feet an hour. Just a wee bit faster and it could get to Pahoa by Halloween.
However….the flow is coupled to a deflationary tilt at the vent which means the level of hot soup in the kettle is going down – probably because it’s leaking out toward us. But when it gets below the new vent again, it will stop again, a new plug will form, and it will have to inflate once more in order to resume. Or not.
There is more. Mauna Loa seems to be slowly filling up again. Without boring everyone with details, at some point WAAAAAY down there, the sea floor above the earth’s crust is being compressed about 8 km by the weight of Mauna Loa. The more Mauna Loa fills up, the more compression but the fact that it IS filling up means the pressure of the underlying magma is greater than the weight of Mauna Loa. It also hints, to me at least, that based upon historical data, that a well-informed person would click on this link and read it: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2012/3104/fs2012-3104.pdf
Back to the map. I don’t want to wait two or three days between visual updates, so I am going to start marking the extent of the flow advance once a day. I won’t know the width or direction, but I can come real close to forward motion and calculate the most probable direction.
This is a test….or, more correctly, a science experiment. The lava should have been about here 12 hours ago, but no guarantees – it might well be twice as far by morning. (There is a little red dot…just click the picture a few times until it becomes visible.)
First, thanks, Mark! I admit my mistakes. The biggest mistake anyone can make is not admitting to their second biggest mistake. 😀
OK…perception: Someone Twittered this and asked “Who cares what an egg is”?
And that’s basically how people think – by perception, without any idea of perspective. And I suppose if you are a post-modern artist, you can draw whatever your mind sees.
But if it’s your job to develop the product, what comes out of your butt makes a HUGE difference.
These are from my back yard. L > R: Emden goose, Mallard duck, shelless chicken egg , Australorp chicken, dove.
No one cares unless they have to lay it so make sure you understand the other person’s point of view. Perspective is always involved.
It is what is ACTUALLY going on, and it is EXACTLY THE SAME THING we are trying to do to Russia via Ukraine and, not coincidentally, to China via Hong Kong.
Try to understand that the US is no longer the country we ‘boomers’ grew up in, or fought for. It is no longer the bastion of liberty and freedom. We are EIGHT TIMES more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist and we PROBABLY CALLED THE POLICE OFFICER FOR HELP.
The US has become the bad guy. Dreaming and pretending and watching football or DWTS won’t change it. WE ARE THE MAJOR EXPORTER OF TERRORISM IN THE WORLD.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-05/siege-kobani-obamas-syrian-fiasco-motion
I am concentrating on the middle east at the moment, but I’ll get around to demonstrating that the US is arming and supporting a neo-nazi regime in Ukraine.
And here we go: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175903/tomgram%3A_pepe_escobar%2C_new_silk_roads_and_an_alternate_eurasian_century/#more
Another: http://www.newsweek.com/american-who-dared-make-putins-case-231388
The stalled lava front stopped, but fresh breakouts are being fed from Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō. They have encompassed the stalled front and are continuing to flow – about 900 feet over the past two days but only about 150 feet since yesterday . Whether or not it will continue to flow, and in what direction, is now conjectural instead of the flat “no” I have been saying to this point, although that is still my opinion.
The reason is this: The flow has never been voluminous. It moves faster over steeper ground and slows and widens over flatter ground. But it is still a ribbon flow, not a mass flow. As it reached more level ground, it widened and stopped, as one would expect. The flow has moved around the stoppage into a water runoff and has narrowed and deepened – thus allowing it to move faster, but not increasing the volume. It is following the terrain; not washing over it as we expect with larger flows.
That is not to say the new vent that created this flow won’t become a larger flow at some point in the future. It almost certainly will. But THIS flow, at THIS time, is an outlier and certainly an inconvenience, but it isn’t a disaster. Living on the side of an active volcano is a little like hunting bears. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you. The sun still rises in the East.
At this point in time, IF the flow continues, my assessment from yesterday is still valid for flow direction. There are variables, but lava, like water, takes the easiest path – and the easiest path is where water runoff travels. If the volume of lava happened to increase and overflow the easiest path, it would continue downhill to the next runoff and follow it until and if it overflowed that.
So you can see the path the lava will likely take simply by correlating the point of the flow to the nearest water runoff. Those are the lines marked in blue on the topographical map: http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/maps/uploads/image-140.jpg and then compare that to the satellite photo: http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/maps/uploads/image-141.jpg .
Except not always. Because the topo is not a perfect representation of the actual situation on the ground, and lava doesn’t flow exactly like water – more like thick, incandescent concrete. You can see this a little in the satellite photo because streets have been superimposed on it in black. For a variety of cartographical reasons, the overlay does not always correspond exactly to the photo. But it is close enough to show that the lava stays in waterflow areas unless it simply overflows one, and then it goes to the next one. Gravity always wins.
You can see those areas in the photo because they are darker green in color – indicating that they are more lush because of a more plentiful waterflow. And you can extrapolate that the lava, at it’s current flow volume, will probably stay within or very near that darker green area. That puts it across Cemetery Road south of the transfer station and across the Old Government Road south of Apa’a Street. You can follow the vegetation and imagine it crossing Hwy 130 North of the Post Office road.
My FIRST prediction was made when the flow had jumped the stream bed it was following on 6 September and was above Kahoe Homesteads where it sort of puddled and piddled and pancaked and couldn’t decide whether it wanted to go further north or further south and eventually it just stopped.
Now it has a little fresh batter from the vent and it dived right into the stream bed it had been trending toward. That has allowed it to move again. It will follow that stream bed very closely if it actually continues to move. If the volume decreases, it will stop. If it increses, it could jump that path and widen to the south.
Earlier in the week I went on a boat and we cruised from Cape Kumakahi to Hilo. It’s a completely different perspective than an aerial photo. From the water It looks worse than I think it is.
Anyway… a friend called today and asked if it could reach HPP. No. But if this is a precurser to Mauna Loa erupting, like ’83-’84, Mauna Loa can potentially reach HPP, however it’s best path to the sea is through Hilo…or Kona. 🙂
Bad Tidings 