Today, Explained - Hawaii versus the volcano

Episode Date: May 16, 2018

Explosions are ramping up on Hawaii’s Big Island this week, as the Kilauea volcano continues to spew lava and blow a 12,000-foot plume of ash into the air. The volcanic gas and lava have already destroyed 25 homes and prompted the evacuation of nearly 2,000 residents. Vox’s Umair Irfan shares the latest news and explains why we choose to live next to exploding mountains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What do you hear? Yanny or Laurel? Yanny. Yanny. iHearMattressFirm.com slash podcast is a website you can visit to get a deal on your next mattress. The deal is use the coupon code PODCAST10 to get 10% off before June 5th. Thanks. Kilauea has sort of this syrupy magma that comes out of the ground. It sort of oozes rather than erupts explosively. And very slowly, it creeps along land and melts things in its path.

It reaches about 1600 degrees Celsius. So metal, rock, asphalt, trees, they don't stand a chance. And as it creeps forward, you see it ignite things ahead of it. And it can form these tall lava flows as well. They can be taller than a person that can easily engulf a car. And it's just this sort of building ominous threat that you can see coming, but you can't stop in any meaningful way. And similarly, if you look at the volcanoes themselves, you can look into the craters and you can see these fiery glowing pits that are spewing sulfur dioxide, gas and ash.

And when they erupt, these ash columns can reach miles into the sky. They can blot out the sun. And if the eruption gets sufficiently large, it can change the temperature of the whole planet. Maybe you've heard about this volcano in Hawaii. It's been 13 days since all of the lava started flowing, but the big headline right now is massive ash plumes that are rising from above the volcano. It is a new phase of the lava started flowing, but the big headline right now is massive ash plumes that are rising from above the volcano. It is a new phase of the eruption as Kilauea spews out giant plumes of smoke and ash 12,000 feet high. And it keeps getting worse.

At least 20 fissures have opened up since the eruptions began May 3rd. The path of lava now stretches for two miles. From outer space, astronauts can see Kilauea. Blue flames can be seen darting into the air, a sign that dangerous gases are being released. So when fissures open up, it's not just lava that comes out. Sometimes there's trapped water that comes out as steam. And there's also gases that are trapped underground, like sulfur dioxide. Umair Irfan writes about the environment for Vox.

And sulfur dioxide is some pretty nasty stuff. You don't want to be breathing it in. Health officials warn that there's no commercial air mask that you can buy at a store that will protect you against it. So your best defense is just to stay away from it. It's colorless, but it does smell sort of like a pungent burning object. And when it reaches the atmosphere, it actually reacts with moisture in a way that creates clouds that can actually help cool the planet. So what is it like right now on the island? It's very unnerving. There's been hundreds of small earthquakes, and a lot of people are very rattled by that. What it looks like is

you see these glowing rocks that are liquid and coming out of the earth and very slowly engulfing trees and roads and cars and just about anything in its path. And so it's moving slowly, but it's very ominous. And it's also creating some pretty spectacular visuals with the lava burning through trees, burning through structures, and just casting this pall over the southern part of the island. And are residents of Hawaii used to seeing things like that? Yeah. I mean, a big part of the big island's tourism industry is seeing these active volcanoes and watching them spew lava very slowly and create new land and seeing this lava fall into the ocean and all that steam billowing up. It's a very iconic visual, but the volcano is actually now starting to affect a

residential area that's kind of new, but it has happened before. Is this the first time the Kilauea volcano has erupted? How did it start? Kilauea has actually been erupting since 1983. Okay. It is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, if not the most active. So the fact that it's doing this is not entirely surprising, nor is it unprecedented. What actually happened, though, at the beginning of May was scientists detected some movement of magma underground. And shortly thereafter, they detected some earthquakes and forecasted and anticipated fissures that would open up in one of the rift zones of the volcano and shortly thereafter

rifts did open up and we saw these fissures that are spewing lava and shooting it up to 300 feet in the air how big is it it's one of the smaller volcanoes on the Big Island. The biggest one is Mauna Loa. But Kilauea covers a good chunk of the southern coast of Hawaii's Big Island. Why are residents of Hawaii drawn to living near an active volcano? Is it the thrill? Is it the tourism? Why would you put your entire life at risk in the first place? Well, it's a risk that people have learned to tolerate.

I mean, volcanoes exist on a different time scale than people. They function on the scales of hundreds of thousands of years and people function on decades. And for indigenous Hawaiians, volcanoes are actually sacred. This is a very important part of their way of life, a very important part of their faith. According to the Hawaiian religion, Tutu Pele, the volcanic goddess, lives in Kilauea. If you mistreat her, she erupts and is angry. If you respect her, then she cares for you and will help you in any situation. She is that great woman that no one can conquer. And so this is an important part of their life. I mean, they revere these hills.

They take them very personally. And so for them to give up their way of life and move away from this would be a huge rupture in their social fabric. And Hawaii just generally like the product of volcanoes, right? That's right. The Mauna Loa volcano is, you know, as we mentioned, one of the largest mountains in the world. And yeah, that's exactly what happened is over the course of a million years, it erupted. And then as it breached the surface, it formed new land. And that's exactly

how those islands formed in the middle of the ocean. So this Kilauea volcano probably won't get to be terribly destructive. Well, that's hard to say at this point. There may be a larger eruption. Scientists are warning that the lava lake in the main crater is falling. Hawaiian officials caution more eruptions could be on the way as red-hot lava in Kilauea's summit lake drains towards underground water. And the concern is, if it starts reaching the water table, it may have a more explosive eruption, which would cast ash and debris over a wider area and cause more damage. Do we know if in the next days and weeks it's going to get better or worse?

The scientist I spoke to said that it would be very optimistic to think that things would stay as they are. Very likely we'll see more fissures. We might see more ash and more lava coming out. But we don't know yet whether weilauea will end up, but just to be on the safe side, we're going to take a tour of the biggest, baddest volcanoes the modern world's ever seen.

That's next. This is Today Explained. Is the dress black and blue? Or white and gold? Or is it a mattress? Mattressfirm.com slash podcast is a great place to find a mattress. You can use the coupon code podcast10 to get 10% off your next mattress before June 5th. Thanks. So this volcano in Hawaii has not been totally destructive to the state. I just wonder, what are the volcanoes in recent memory that had more of an impact? Right, volcanoes can have an impact even when they're not burning things down or destroying property. You may remember the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland.

Nice. I practiced. The volcano's creating rivers of lava more than five football fields long and sending smoke more than two miles high. Tonight, travelers are stranded in all on six continents. That spewed a huge column of ash. And since Iceland's in the middle of the Atlantic, that stopped air travel from the United States to Europe for several weeks. And it brought the economy to a halt while air travel was

grounded, while aircraft had to avoid ash. And that had a major global effect. One of the more iconic volcanic eruptions was Mount Vesuvius on Pompeii in Italy in the year 79. And that was particularly devastating because it caught so many people off guard. The flow from the volcano, the ash and the lava moved so quickly that it killed about 13,000 people. The more deadlier volcanoes, there was a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. Mount Tambora erupted in 1815 and that killed close to 92,000 people. And that was not necessarily because of the eruption itself so much as the ash that was spewed from the volcano that killed crops. So the main cause of death there was actually starvation. And then in living memory, I think the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia is the most deadly. It killed close to 23,000 people when it erupted in 1985.

I mean, volcanoes have a long history in culture, in society, in legend. In movies. In movies. We don't want to start a panic. Dante's Peak, 1997, Pierce Brosnan. Ladies and gentlemen, please remain calm. Please just stay calm. That's the one where they found the corpses in the hot spring.

Hells yeah. Sure, anytime you see this torrent of lava destroying stuff, I mean, it's awesome. It always looks cool. I'm thinking more of Joe versus the volcano and Tom Hanks. I think that was probably the best rendition of a volcano on film. Don't jump in. Patricia?

Would you listen to me? These are my last words. I gotta be brave. I't jump in. Patricia, listen to me. These are my last words. I gotta be brave. I gotta jump in. Different strokes for different folks. Sure, we'll go with that. I don't want to like go back to the fourth grade totally, but how do these puppies really work? Volcanoes are some of the most awe-inspiring features on earth. They create new land. They destroy civilizations. They're more powerful than nuclear weapons. And the Krakatoa volcano, when it erupted, produced the loudest sound ever heard. Volcanoes are leaks of hot rock from deep in the Earth coming to the surface.

The Earth's mantle is very hot. This is the layer of almost solid rock and it can reach temperatures of up to 3700 degrees Celsius. And as pressures change or as they come across certain kinds of rock, they melt. And depending on the certain structures of the earth earth they can come and extrude all the way to the surface and modern science has developed to the point where we know when this is going to happen right we're getting a better and better sense of it volcanoes are not subtle so we can detect some of the rumblings before they go off. Like the recent Kilauea eruption, scientists did

detect movement of magma underground, and they also detected tremors that seemed to indicate that some sort of eruption was imminent, and they were able to forecast where the fissures would actually form. Similarly with other big volcanoes, scientists have been able to anticipate at least a couple days in advance whether a volcano will erupt or that there might be some activity going on. The big concern with forecasting volcanoes is that there is a high false alarm rate that a lot of the times you can see ruptures, you can see small earthquakes or even releases of gas and then nothing will happen. Is the opposite possible? Is it possible that a volcano like Kilauea or another in the United States or elsewhere just erupts and is totally destructive without any warning?

I think we may see a major eruption happen on a very short timescale. I mean, I think we did see that with Mount St. Helens when that erupted in Washington state. At 8.32 a.m. on May 18, 1980... We are directly above Mount St. Helens now, and there is no question that the volcanic activity has started. It erupted with the force of 24 megatons of TNT, which is roughly 1,600 times the size of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. But for the most part, we scientists do anticipate seeing some sort of signal ahead of a major volcanic eruption. Where are the other active volcanoes in the United States?

Most of the volcanoes in the United States are along the West Coast, and they're part of a region of the world known as the Ring of Fire. Love is a pattern of volcanoes and earthquakes of seismic activity we see going from New Zealand to Southeast Asia to Japan through Alaska, then the west coast of the United States, and then down into South America. And what's going on is this is where the earth is actually running into itself. I fell into a burning ring of fire. I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher. And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire, the ring of fire. The tectonic plate here is under the Pacific Ocean, and it's running underneath the tectonic plates that

are hosting the continents. And over here, we see water being channeled deep underground, and that is helping cause some of the rock underground to melt and then work its way back up to the surface. So the Ring of Fire is home to about 90% of the world's earthquakes and about 75% of the world's volcanoes. So it's not surprising that we see U.S. volcanoes in this region. Now, Hawaii is not in the ring of fire. It's actually in the middle of a tectonic plate, and it's occurring over what's called a hotspot. And it's causing the rock underground to melt and then work its way up to the surface. You talk about Hawaii, New Zealand, Japan. I mean, it sounds a little bit like we go out of our way to live near volcanoes.

Well, for humans, it's actually been really good. I mean, if you look at where people live, I mean, the Ring of Fire is home to millions, if not billions of people. It's one of some of the most densely populated regions of the world, some of the most economically developed, in part because volcanic soil tends to be really good for growing crops. It's very nutrient rich. Volcanic islands also make excellent ports, so they're great for commerce and trade. So it makes sense that a lot of countries that want to develop and want to do trade, they'll do it along these coastal regions that also happen to

be home to a lot of volcanoes. I think the current estimate is roughly about 800 million people live within 60 miles of an active volcano around the world. Are humans now doing anything to provoke volcanoes? They don't really care about us and there's really nothing that we can do to sort of nudge them in any particular direction. What is changing is how we're exposing ourselves to risk from these volcanoes. Lots of people live around volcanoes and a lot of volcanic side effects are actually quite attractive to people like the fertile soil, the beautiful scenery, the islands in the middle of the ocean. So while we're not causing them to erupt more, we are building a lot more expensive real estate around areas that could potentially

be damaged. Sounds a lot like forest fires in California. It sounds like forest fires in California. It sounds like property in Miami that gets hit by hurricanes. It sounds like property that's built on floodplains. Volcanoes show us how helpless we are, but also how dependent we are on the natural world. And as we try to reshape the world to our benefit, we've often run into these limits. And volcanoes show us just how spectacular and just how devastating the world can be when it works against us. Omer Irfan covers climate change, the environment, and energy at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Viram. This is Today Explained. Mattress Firm. Mattress Firm. Mattress Firm.

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