Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Well, no tsunami yesterday, completing the trifecta of non-disasters. The potential here was anulled rather quickly, but it took a while longer to clear things in Chile. We did, however, have another earthquake last night. This one was centered, as nearly as I can tell, just a few miles northwest of our house. Also, again last night the clouds were at just the right elevation to be spectactularly illuminated by the 21 July fissure.

And another thing. . .

Oddly enough, while I was writing the last post about earthquakes, a m7.5 occurred off the coast of Peru, prompting a potential tsunami message. Then two more near-m6 earthquakes in Peru.

Here we go again.

A lot more things in heaven and earth, recently

Anybody on this island looking for inspiration for literature from the natural world will not lack material for the latter half of August.

Beginning with the Perseid meteor showers starting sometime around 8 August and peaking on 12 August, there have been several routine (in the geologic or astronomical sense) yet remarkable (in the participant or observer’s sense).

I guess this hurricane thing has legs

In distinct contrast with the school cancellations for snow when I was a kid, I have now had a free day from work due to a hurricane. Of course, that merely frees me to go to another job where I will probably spend most of my time either waking up early to inspect the road to the summit or standing in the rain telling people that said road is closed.

We’re a pretty self-sufficient county, in general, and Harry Kim’s background in civil defense may be what makes him so good at the competent-yet-understated messages whose absence so plagues most of the U.S. during natural disasters. Granted part of our self-sufficiency results from our utter lack of infrastructure in many places (those of you who have been to my house can now start laughing). But still.

I have a suspicion that we’ll lose electricity and possibly phones for a while, but I’ve got enough propane to keep my ice cream and beer cold, and what else do you really need?

Wonders of nature

Last night at work we had customarily clear skies and a pretty good crowd for the Perseid meteor shower, which peaked in the early morning hours today (HST). The shower was good but not spectacular: without trying particularly hard I saw about a dozen meteors, including a couple of near-bolides. I saw a few meteors as Perseus rose on Friday night, too, and we’ll probably see more tonight as the shower tapers off.

A few nights at work

Stargazing was pretty good the last couple of nights. Even with the remnants of Cosme on Saturday, we managed to have clear skies all four nights. But the highlight on Sunday and Tuesday nights were definitely the clear skies all the way down to Kilauea. Based on the update from HVO, we had one of the best views anyone has gotten of the fissure eruptions that started on 21 July.

We even dragged a couple of Dobsonian telescopes over to the picnic tables at the back of the parking lot and trained them on the eruption. Based on our back-of-the-envelope calculations, the eruption subtended an angle of about one degree (half as wide as my thumb, held at arm’s length) and was about forty miles away. That made the visible part of the flow about a mile long, but please note that the error bars on that number are large–nearly the size of the envelope itself.

Subject re: Kaselehlia (kah-say-lay-lee-ah) from Pohnpei (pon-pay)!

Hōkūle‛a and Maisu are getting ready to depart Pohnpei for Chuuk today (or tomorrow, since I still have trouble with the dateline where today is 5 March on our side of the dateline, and 6 March on their side).

Gary Kubota of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin is crewing for this leg of the voyage, and has an excellent brief article on the effects of current and projected sea level rise on Pacific Island nations, specifically the FSM.

If any kindly contributors can suggest a better way to correctly get the Hawaiian characters in to the Camino browser, I’d be grateful.

Continue below the fold for another update by Rod Floro, crew member on Maisu.

No snow in Hawai`i equals global warming?

This is the question which many people seem to have answered to the affirmative after a Hawaii Tribune-Herald article last weekend. While I am glad that conciousness seems to be higher about the inconvenient truth, I am not sure that it is a good thing that any anecdote about warmer weather be conflated with climate change in general.

I think while it may raise short-term awareness, it does so while not really changing the general opinion about what science can and can’t do, particularly on complicated issues.

Besides which, if you look at the web cams today, warm is not a word that would come directly to mind.

Other opinions?

Living vicariously across the Pacific

I recieved an email from my friend Rod Floro, a science teacher at Kea’au Middle School who is spending the next several weeks at sea as a crew member on the Alingano Maisu. As with any trip, Rod experienced problems with the airlines and new language at the destination when he flew from Hawai`i Island to Majuro in the Marshall Islands.

According to the PVS website, the voyage from Kealakekua Bay to Majuro lagoon was about 2200 miles and 26 days. One of the first actual signs of land (other than the knowledge of the navigators) was a sighting of birds (manu o ku or white terns) which can range out about a hundred miles from land during the day. Also, Google Maps has much better pictures of Majuro available than they did a couple of days ago.

Below the fold is a bit of Rod’s email–enjoy.

Voyaging and maps in the Pacific

Here’s a new tracking map for Ku Holo La Komohana, via Google Maps. Still not a lot of detail, but that has a lot to do with the emptiness of the ocean in that neighborhood. There is, however much more color, and as they head South, there will be more to see.

On Tuesday 6 February, the canoes passed Johnston Atoll–an island so small and isolated that it nearly defies description. As a natural counterpart to its status as a National Wildlife Refuge (dedicated in 1926), since 1962 Johnston has also been a high-altitude nuclear weapon test site and a storage depot for many of the US’s nastiest chemical WMDs. Come on, they’re good for the coral.

At any rate, there are also many more pictures on the Polynesian Voyaging Society blog. Many mahalos to the crew for putting the time in on that stuff, when they have so many other demands on their time.