It’s spewing rocks now. Pics at the link; story too. Haven’t found any video yet.
Can’t keep the golfers down though.
How close is the course? About 1.5 miles. Map at: use satellite view.
Hey, the volcano crater/caldera at Kilauea is downwind from the course - for now.
I’ve been pretty busy this week. In a nutshell, 22 fissures now, while yesterday morning was some sort of explosive eruption in the summit itself, but probably not the explosive eruption they’ve been waiting for. The lava just crossed a main road today, cutting off one escape route. May start entering the ocean soon.
And a week ago, a Letter to the Editor in the local paper asked a question I’ve been wondering about. Some people have been allowed back in when possible to retrieve belongs … and pets. ??? Who would leave their pets behind in the first place to be met with a possible lava death? The mind boggles.
It’s not necessarily voluntary. One story, recalled from memory: pet owner has two dogs, and suddenly all hell breaks loose: ground shaking, fissures erupting, fumes, etc. One dog runs away, one dog stays with the owner.
Emergency personnel come by and demand immediate evacuation. Owner has one dog, calls out in vain for other dog, which has disappeared.
Authorities are all, “hey! Out of the pool! NOW!” so owner leaves with one dog, worried sick about the other but unable to do anything since other dog has fled.
In subsequent days, owner is allowed back into the area of their home, and desperately tries to find missing dog (successfully in the story I am vaguely recalling).
As for me, I’m just pleased that County officials have made it clear that shelters and procedures are being designed to accommodate pets. I’ve seen other emergencies where the standard rhetoric was more along the lines of, “What? You think we give a shit about your pets? No way, humans only.” I can understand that approach if it is absolutely necessary, but it heartens me to think that on Hawaii, there is more consideration being given to our non-human companions.
I can only hope that is the case.
First lava-related injury. Some guy was watching the flow from his third-floor balcony when some flying lava caught him on the leg. Story here.
Fissures 16 and 20 are merging, and the flow is heading rapidly to the coast. It’s crossed and blocked one of the few roads out of the region now.
There’s a link at the end of that story: Lava continues pouring into ocean, creating new health hazard
The top of the page is over 230 images, some from satellites and some from right up close; they are amazing. I gotta tell y’all, one of my life’s mottos has always been “don’t take chances take risks” but when I look at most of those pictures of lava spewing and oozing over huge swaths of land, pretty much every fiber of my being screams NO NO NO NO NONONONONONONONONO and just wants to get the fuck away from the lava and the volcano and the ash and the toxic fumes… and I’m comfortably far away in Las Vegas. How the hell can you live close enough to spewing magma that it’s a realistic possibility that you’ll get hit in the leg by it and be so casual as to just go hang out on your balcony so that it actually happens? 
They’ve done this for a loooong time. those golfers up in post 62 during the current eruption playing along? Here’s another photo from the 1924 eruption - Crowd at the Volcano House Hotel posing for pictures with the explosion in the background.:eek: They are the same 1.5 miles from the crater as the golfers.
More photos from the 1924 boomer at: https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/geo_hist_1924_halemaumau.html
I remember as a kid seeing on television some guy that liked to sculpt lava. He would approach a flow wearing a heat suit (or whatever it is called), grab some lava with a loooong metal ladle, drop it in a bucket of water, and while the rock is still soft enough to shape but firm enough to hold the shape, use other metal tools to make (of necessity pretty simple) shapes from that. I always remembered that as one of The Coolest (but not literally) Things Ever.
Also, it is dissapointing that there aren’t any nice kimberlite volcanos around now. It’d be fun to wait for a flow to cool and go chip out some fresh diamonds.
Those golfers are probably pretty safe. The ash cloud looks bodacious, but that’s not where the lave is coming from, and I think the prevailing winds are carrying the ash away. I think they’re too far to be affected by the cow-sized boulder missiles.
I think it’s 23 fissures now, and the lava is pouring into the ocean. They’re warning of “laze,” lava-haze, which is poisonous.
They’ve scaled back the number of fissures to 22. Apparently No. 23 turned out to be an extension of I think it was No. 4. Three rivers of lava were entering the ocean, but two rivers have merged, making it two pouring into the ocean now. This is how Hawaii is the only state whose land area is actually growing.
More explosions at the summit too. The ash seems to all be blowing southerly due to the prevailing trade winds.
Three weeks now, and the activity is only intensifying. A resident on the news – not sure if he lost his home or just had to evacuate – was saying on the news tonight that he initially felt a degree of guilt, wondering if it was because he had done something wrong. I’m thinking, “Yeah, you built on the slope of a friggin’ live volcano!”
What no one is talking about is that Earth is losing it’s heat! Volcanoes leak the heat from Earth’s core, and if it keeps up we’ll be frozen and dead! :eek:
And in other just-out-of-bed brainwaves… I think I remember a scene in Gilligan’s Island where a volcano is about to erupt. I think the castaways were playing charades or something, and Mr. Howell was miming (charading?) ‘It’s a hot time in the old town tonight’.
I wonder if it would be possible to build a lava-flow-proof residence. Either up very high on very strong and fireproof pillars, or surrounded by a big strong concrete wall, or something.
Even if you could, you still have the problem of it either being surrounded by 2,000 degree molten rock, or just above 2,000 degree molten rock - you’d basically have an oven. Not someplace you’d want to stay during an eruption. Also, contents of said box would, if it’s anything like a normal household, be flammable. Lots of things will spontaneously burst into flames at that temperature, and anything aluminum would melt into a puddle.
There was a thread about building a lava moat around one’s lair, and the consensus seemed to be that lava is not like water, or even hot water: it’s a LOT denser and a LOT hotter, and the heat storage per unit volume is incredible. Even if it wasn’t heated to a thousand degrees or more, a volume of lava would still release far more energy per degree of cooling than the same volume of water at the same temperature. And you can’t go right up to the edge of a lava lake either; the radiant heat and convected air will kill you before you ever touch it.
I suspect that a “lava-flow-proof residence” would end up being on top of a small mountain.
The fissures are also putting out thousands of TONS of poisonous gas each day; primarily H2S.
You might be physically protected only to expire from farts.
Don’t forget the “laze” - fog composed of acid steam and teeny shards of glass.
If you drive around on the Big Island, you’ll see many “islands” that were by passed by by previous lava flows. They were simply small hills that the lava flowed around instead of over. If your home was a top one of these, it would have been spared.
I first visited the Big Island in 1986 (not knowing then that decades later I’d be living there), with my husband and another couple - all of them attorneys (I am not). The scenery as we drove around the south of the island was spectacular. The three lawyers were intently discussing, “so, if the lava creates new land, who owns it?” while I was gaping at the magnificent landscapes. I thought their focus on reviewing legal issues instead of glorying in the raw beauty of the natural world around us was a pretty good demonstration of why NOT to go to law school.
Ok, I think this is darkly funny. Or funny in an ominously red glowing way. Lava from one of the fissures is encroaching onto PGV territory, threatening a power plant run by Puna Geothermal Ventures.
Yes, that is correct, hot, runny earth is going destroy a facility built to generate electricity using heat from within the Earth.