Kilauea Iki is the name given to a lava lake that formed in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park in 1959. It erupted from Pu'u Pua'i, the mound you see in the middle distance of this photograph:

The lava pooled in a pre-existing crater below to a maximum depth of about 400 feet, and has been solidifying ever since. Researchers have drilled though the cooling crust of Kilauea Iki to determine how fast the lava cools. By 1981, a good 200 feet of solid rock had formed at the top of the lava lake.

Here's a view into Kilauea Iki from a different angle, with me rotated about 90 degrees along the crater rim relative to the first photograph:



As you look down there, you'll see that Kilauea Iki does not display a nice smooth surface. Instead, it's fractured, and those fractures have a familiar shape: polygonal and relatively regularly-spaced. They look kinda like the tops of ginormous columns...


When you get down inside, it's pretty flat. You really get the feeling you're walking on a giant layer of soup scum:


...But it's not completely flat. There are cracks and crevices, buckles and upwarps:


Dynamics playing out in this mega-scum layer atop a roiling lava lake are thought to be human-scale analogues of the motion and dynamics of tectonic plates. Here, for instance, two "plates" of cooled lava have drifted towards one another. This meso-scale "convergent boundary" has raised up a mountain range fit for Lilliputians:


Elsewhere, "plates" of lava scum have drifted apart, opening up a "rift" between them. Here, I lie down to bridge the rift:


These cracks are utilized by plants because they offer a shaded nook where moisture isn't immediately evaporated by the sun:


Lastly, I thought I'd point out some neat mass wasting and structural geology I saw there. Here's a shot looking roughly westward across Kilauea Iki, towards the cinder cone of Pu'u Pua'i:

I know it's kind of washed out, but in this photo, you can see a big solidified lava flow that came over the lip of the crater, and then solidified, and then partially collapsed downward.

This sequence resulted in the big talus pile you can see at center-right, but there are remnants of the original sheet (or "tongue") of basalt there.





















Zooming in and cranking up the contrast, let's label a few things:
Up at the top, we can see some fault scarps that have developed as the massive tongue of basalt pulled downward.

A major scarp marks the edge of the cliff, and then below it you see a big slab of basalt with an edge that's just barely in the sunshine, and a bunch of more fragmented pieces below that (marked "breakdown"). Another big slab is seen alongside the breakdown.

What really caught my eye, though, was the en echelon array of pull-apart fractures seen in between the arrows. Here, the stress of the main tongue of basalt sliding downhill sheared this slab of rock, causing it to develop fractures at a ~40 degree angle to the shearing direction. These pull-aparts therefore represent a big surface-condition analogue for tension gashes that can form in subterranean rocks experiencing shear stress.

Labels: analogies, basalt, hawaii, landslide, mass wasting, plate tectonics, structure, travel

I've got a few more stories to tell from Hawai'i... Today I'd like to share the tale of a backpacking trip that my friend Lily and I took along the northern coast of the big island. From the road's end at the Pololu Overlook, we descended into the Pololu Valley, across its excellent beach, then up the adjacent ridge to the east, down into the next valley, up another ridge (and further east), and then down into the third valley, where we camped.

The route is shown on this Google "My Maps" map:


Here's a look eastward into that final valley:


Descending into the final valley:


The view from our campsite:


The substrate of our campsite: a poorly-lithified conglomerate:


The thing that stands out in my mind most about this excursion was a landslide scar that had cut off the trail at one point. This landslide occured in the middle valley (between Pololu and our campsite valley). The landslide scar is nice and visible in the lower-left of this Google Maps image:


It happened in 2006, triggered by the big earthquake that struck the big island that year. It was one of several landslides that were set off by that shaking. (Wikipedia has a nice "live-action" photo of another cliff collapsing up the coast at Waipio.)

Here's the landslide scar viewed from the east, looking west (on our hike back towards Pololu):


Another shot from the same perspective shows the run-out of debris below the source:


The tricky thing about this was that we had to get past this landslide, since it wiped out the trail. On our way in, we somewhat stupidly climbed down the face of the landslide itself, gingerly picking our way down the steep slope, so we didn't trigger any further mass wasting. Here, for instance, is a poorly-put-together composite photo showing Lily descending into the valley:


(On the way out, we found some ropes in the vegetation next to the slide, and hauled ourselves up those rather than getting on the slide surface again.) But on the way in, when we got to the bottom, we weren't sure where the trail was, and plunged through some dense bamboo forest. I felt like I was in LOST, where the characters are perpetually fighting their way through similar vegetation:


Eventually we found the trail, and continued along. Because of the landslide blocking access, this part of the trail hasn't been used as much for the past two years. Lots of pandanus leaves had been shed off and blanketed some parts of the trail. Hiking across these dried pandanus leaves was a noisy affair:


On the eastern side of the ridge between "Landslide Valley" and "Campsite Valley," we saw this two-inch-wide crack opening up along the trail, parallel to the ridge/valley trend. The edge of the ridge was about twenty feet away towards the east (direction my boot toe is pointing). Certainly something like this portends a future episode of mass wasting...

Labels: hawaii, landslide, mass wasting, sediment, travel

Would you like a little geoblogosphere with your coffee this morning?

There's some great stuff out there today...

Andrew Alden (Geology.About.com) showcases the Fransiscan melange on a trip to Shell Beach.

Watch Perito Moreno glacier do some AWESOME calving at En Morrenas (Spanish-language geoblog). Watch the whole thing for perspective (3 minutes), but the really spectacular collapse occurs at ~2 minutes into the video. Watch the splash and watch the huge chunks of ice go zinging off into the surrounding air. Wild!

Dave Petley (Dave's Landslide Blog) reviews the dangers of a collapse of a volcanic flank in the Canary Islands, and what it means for Atlantic Ocean tsunami risk.

And for the geobloggers in the house, Chris proposes getting together in January at a science blogging conference in North Carolina. I think this could be cool. I just signed up.

Time for another cup of coffee... Good morning!

Labels: blogs, california, geology, glaciation, landslide, meetings, north carolina, south america

One of the most interesting spots I visited this summer was the Madison River landslide area, between Hebgen Lake and Ennis, Montana. Here's a photograph of the landslide scar:


Google Map of the area:


My "Northern Rocky Mountain Geology" class (through the MSSE program) visited the area this summer. Here's the class (all science educators of one sort or another) walking up to the viewing platform:


What happened here? On August 17, 1958, a large earthquake ~10 miles to the east occurred. Known as the Hebgen Lake earthquake, it was a magnitude 7.5 on the Richter Scale, and shook much of the northern Rocky Mountain area. The earthquake's effects were most deadly where the Madison River drops down out of the mountains and into a graben to the west. There, schistose bedrock with a plane of foliation that dipped steeply into the valley was jarred loose. Sliding along the foliation's plane of weakness, and unthinkably massive amount of rock ( estimated at 70 to 80 million tons) went downhill, crushing a forest service campground and damming the Madison River. The momentum carried the rocky debris up the other side of the valley, where the Visitor Center is located today. There are some huuuuuuuge boulders there, as big as a house. 28 people lost their lives in the landslide (and related smaller-scale rockfalls further up the valley).

The Madison River began to back up behind the new dam, and it formed a "quake lake" called Quake Lake (sometimes called "Earthquake Lake," as in the Google Map above). The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was worried that the dam would fail, draining Quake Lake rapidly and causing a catastrophic flood downstream. (They were cognizant that this had happened at the Gros Ventre landslide several decades earlier in nearby Wyoming.) So they bulldozed open a spillway, and got the lake level down to where they felt it didn't pose a huge flood risk for Ennis and other downstream communities.

But they didn't get the water back down to pre-landslide levels. Today, you can see a drowned forest along the shores of Quake Lake:


We also visited a couple of exposures of the Hebgen Fault scarp. Here's one at a campsite in the Gallatin National Forest. You can see the big dirty slope in the background: that's the actual fault scarp. Total offset here is something like 2.5 meters.


Another view of the fault scarp, looking along its trace.


Clever wayside sign, mimicing the offset in the land with offset in the sign:

Labels: landslide, mass wasting, montana, msse

Mass wasting is the downslope movement of Earth materials (rock, soil, debris) under the influence of gravity. Landslildes, rockfalls, slump, and creep are all examples of mass wasting. Today in Indonesia's island of Java, there were a series of landslides triggered by lots of rain. Rain often acts as a catalyst for mass wasting, for several reasons. First, rain is heavy. Once soil gets waterlogged, it just plain weighs more. Heavier masses are more likely to slide than petite ones. Second, water expands soils, pushing outwards from pore spaces. This expansion factor can cause slopes like the hillsides in this AP photograph to increase their gradient every so slightly -- sometimes beyond a critical angle called the "angle of repose". When a slope is below the angle of repose, it stays put ("reposes"). Above the angle of repose, it slides. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, water acts as a lubricant, reducing frictional inertia and allowing soil particles to slide past one another. I call this the "Slip N Slide" effect -- consider the difference between going down a waterslide with water and one that's dry. The water "greases the skids" and facilitates movement. Indonesia is particularly susceptible to landslides because of volanically-steepened slopes and heavy tropical rains. Sometimes, its landslides are triggered by seismic shaking. More on today's landslides can be seen on the BBC's website.

Labels: indonesia, landslide, mass wasting