It occurred to me that, to some extent, I’d like my most of my blog posts to be like these Friday Notes posts: extemporaneous ramblings and the setting free of any notes recently captured. And some old stories (and maybe a few pictures).
It’s not that I want to stop ‘splaining stuff, my inner teacher is strong. (Is it man-splaining if you’re a teacher?) It’s been one of my things since grade school. Spead knowledge!
But the rambling sure is easy. And fun!
It’s no secret; I’m hard to impress. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, been places, learned stuff, bought the tee-shirts. I’m not willfully hard to impress; I don’t resist being impressed. It’s just that after all these years it takes something genuinely impressive.
Like volcanoes. They’re impressive. Something about lava really grabs me. Rock running like molasses; I want to play in it. Yet somehow there is only one volcano in my heart: Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawai’i. I’m so impressed I did two Wednesday Wow posts about it.
And this baby makes three…
Fissure #8.
Wow, for the third time this month (third time in a week) I’ve realized the day calls for a post I hadn’t planned. The first time was when the MLB delayed the baseball season. The second time — the very next day — was Pi Day and Albert Einstein’s birthday.
This time it’s the equinox (and a friend’s birthday; shout out!). For those of us in the northern hemisphere it’s the spring (vernal) equinox, and that’s my favorite of the four annual solar node points (two equinoxes; two solstices). It means we have a whole half a year of light ahead.
So I just had to post something.
The Goddess Pele
by Arthur Johnsen
The previous year was an interesting one for me. Last July marked five years of retirement, which has been great, but part of me misses the high information content and challenges work threw at me daily. I’ve tried to keep busy with my own pursuits, one of which was a temporary obsession with the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island, Hawai‘i.
I wrote about this back in August, just after the (unprecedented) activity subsided. At the time, no one knew if the volcano was just taking a breath, or if the lava flow was really over. At this point we know it was over; there has been no activity since.
For two-and-a-half months, though, it was an impressive display of the undeniable power of Mother Earth and, in particular, her fiery daughter Pele.
Infamous Fissure #8!
I’ve been semi-obsessed the last few weeks by the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Back in early May there was a magnitude 6.9 earthquake in the volcanic system, and then things got interesting (in the curse sense). By late May a fissure in the east rift zone was emitting lava at a rate (100 cubic meters per second) not recorded in our history of recording things like that.
All that lava came from a reservoir — the magma chamber — in the volcano, so Kilauea began experiencing “collapse events” as the summit subsided into the space left by the departed magma. These collapse events resulted in magnitude 5.3 (or so) earthquakes roughly every 32 hours (plus or minus a lot).
And a bunch of us interested parties were online chatting, watching, and waiting for the next collapse event!
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