Adventures in liquid hot magma!

Ok, I’m lying a bit while referencing Austin Powers. I haven’t played with active lava…YET. Tomorrow we’re going to the active flow field and I’ll hopefully get to poke lava with a stick. Here are some pictures of the lava flows from Sunday to tide you over until I have an adventure to relate!

Here’s a lava pool on Kilauea’s flank called the Thanksgiving Eve Breakout (TEB) vent.

Here’s a flow issuing from TEB.

Bear in mind that these aren’t my photos, but rather pictures taken by one of our geologists on a helicopter overflight. I’ll have a much different perspective tomorrow…up close and personal, I hope!

Lava Pools.

Since I haven’t uploaded my photos from Wednesday’s fieldwork, for now you get to see the Kapoho Tide Pools. I snorkeled these last weekend.

The pools are as shallow as two feet and as deep as 15. The coral in the pools closest to shore was bleached, but the corals farther out were vibrant and beautiful. I saw two unicornfish, known locally as kala, fighting in a tidepool. Very intriguing to watch, since when they were finished with their skirmish they both resumed nibbling the same piece of fan coral.

Here’s what the sky to the south looked like towards the end of our tide pool visit.

More adventures tomorrow!

P.S. – For Richard: We haven’t processed the data yet, but when we do I’ll let you know if we find any gravity anomalies. For the anonymous reader who asked, the Graviton EG costs about $100,000 USD. No joke.