Tag: volcano

11-04-16 Present at the Creation

My blog title today is figurative, of course. And literal.

By Scott Shephard

I’m not old enough to have been present at The Creation, which happened eons ago. But I can finally say that I did witness the slow and geologic creation of a little more earth – in this case the Big Island of Hawaii.

I have seen videos of lava flows on Hawaii before and while the lava seems dangerous, it also seems deceptively sedate – it has an amazingly warm glow and it seems to move languorously. But when you witness molten lava flowing into the ocean from as close as 50 feet away, it is anything but benign.

The sound of the boiling sea water, the whiff of sulfurous gas and the crash of the waves against the new-formed earth are both fascinating and scary.

The boat ride to this amazing place wasn’t exactly easy as we were pounding into 7 foot swells most of the way. And it wasn’t cheap, either. But it was certainly worth it.

A few more from our outing . . .

And a short video . . . 

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAotLMTzZBk&w=854&h=480]

04-23-16 Genesis

“In the beginning. . . ” (read more)

By Scott Shephard

When I think of the “Book of Genesis” in the Old Testament, I don’t think of God willing coconut trees to grow out of volcanic rock on a place like the Big Island of Hawaii. But why not?

There is certainly something elemental about a fledgling tree growing out of some of Earth’s newest land – in this case near (or over) what was once the community of Kalapana. The black volcanic rock looks impossibly barren and hard but it is neither – it is brittle and rich in nutrients. Soon, there will be rich soil here and maybe even earth worms. But the word “soon” has a different meaning here and can’t easily be understood in human years.

Come back in a few thousand years and you won’t know the place. I’m thinking God’s watch doesn’t measure days or minutes or seconds. Probably not not months or years, either. . . .

Canon 5DIII 1/125s f/6.7 ISO100 47mm

01-08-16 Life Returns. Slowly.

After the volcano erupts, life returns. (read more)

Scott Shephard

One of the things that is striking about the so-called Big Island of Hawaii is that it is the “youngest” of all of the Hawaiian islands. What that means is that it is only 500,000 years old. On a human scale, that is really old, of course. But compare that number with the age of the rocks in the Black Hills in my home state of South Dakota – geologists say that they are around 2 billion years old. On a human scale that’s almost unimaginable.

But compare either the age of the Black Hills or that of Hawaii with the fact that the moss covered rocks you are looking at bubbled out of the depths of the earth in 1960. And a few miles from where I took this photo, you can walk on parts of the earth that were formed an hour ago. (The walk is imaginary given that the stones would melt your shoes.)

For me, the paradox of Hawaii is the lushness of so many parts of the island juxtaposed with the seeming bareness of places pictured here. But in the 55 years since the eruption that formed this ground, if you look closely, you will see that life is abundant. Give this area another half million years and watch out! It will be a jungle. Maybe.

Isn’t it odd that the “maybe” in that last statement is up to us and the choices we make today about preserving our planet? What took billions of years to form might be destroyed by 200 years of human inattention.

Canon 5DIII 1/15s f/16.0 ISO200 100mm