| Before
we could see the lava flow, we could feel its heat and
hear the noise of trees breaking and crashing to the
ground as the thick wall of molten rock moved through
the forest above us. Lava from Kilauea Volcano’s
east rift zone was threatening the remote Royal Gardens
subdivision just outside Hawai’i Volcanoes National
Park, and scientists were there to monitor its course.
There
was still some hope that this flow might follow the
path of an earlier one and miss the upper corner of
the subdivision, but just at dusk as we watched in awe
a huge, glowing mass of lava moved slowly out of the
dense ‘ohi’a forest and overran the top
of Queen Avenue. This was a massive, chunky flow of
a type of lava that geologists call ‘a’a,
and it advanced more slowly than would the thinner,
more liquid pahoehoe lava. About six feet thick, this
jumble of red-orange molten rock had an upper crust
that had cooled to black; it inched forward about two
feet a minute with red-hot rocks cascading and clinking
down the steep front of the flow. Moving slowly but
inexorably, it toppled and burned blooming ‘ohi’a
trees, tall tree ferns, and mango trees heavy with ripening
fruit. Every few minutes we heard small underground
explosions as far as 100 yards from the edges of the
flow as heated tree roots gave off gas that suddenly
ignited with a loud thud, tossing fist-sized rocks high
into the air.
...The
islands most people think of as the Hawaiian Chain stretch
from the Island of Hawai’i where the oldest rocks
are less than a million years old and the youngest are
still forming, northwest across the Pacific to Kaua’i
where the oldest rocks are 5 million years old. But
the chain actually extends far beyond that—past
Kaua’i it continues in a northwesterly direction
for 2,500 miles with the remnants of eroded, mostly
submerged islands of older and older origins.
—From “Fire From Beneath The Sea”
by Barbara and Robert Decker
Fire
From Beneath The Sea
Barbara and Robert Decker
48 pages. Oversized 10”x13”
ISBN 1-58071-044-1
$9.95 
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