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Airliner Chronicles: Finding Fault by Flying
Flying can be no fun whatsoever, what with the lines, the waits, the security checks, surly attendants, and the tarmac delays. It would be intolerable were it not for window seats. So while I'm in...
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Pele is a Capricious Goddess...Part One (A Return to the Realm of Fire)
Note to my Geology 190 Students: this IS NOT a picture from my current visit. Lava is NOT flowing this way right now. I offer NO GUARANTEES that anything we see on our trip in two weeks will be...
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Pele is a Capricious Goddess (reprised)...Part Two
Continuing the story from the previous post, I had a second chance to see a volcano in action in 2004. I was the newly elected president of the Far West Section of the National Association of...
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Pele is a Capricious Goddess...Part Three, a Precious Gift from a Mysterious...
One of the most awe-inspiring moments of my lifeI've been celebrating my impending return to the Hawaiian Islands by revising and expanded a few posts I did in 2009 about the volcano goddess Pele, and...
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Airliner Chronicles: When Disaster Arrived from the Heavens
I thought briefly of making this one of those "What is it?" kind of posts, but it seemed kind of obvious. We were flying home from our weekend in St. Louis, and without a GPS, I was trying to get...
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Airliner Chronicles: Stuck on a Plane with a Proselytizer...
And really, I felt sorry for the poor guy who was stuck sitting with me on the plane flight from St. Louis to LAX. Oh, I wasn't trying to convert the poor guy into some religion. No, he got the...
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Just for Fun, a Minor Monday Mystery
Where am I and how do you know? There is the obvious clue provided by the street signs, but if they weren't there, would you have any way of knowing something of where I spent the day? A clue: the...
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A Most Misunderstood Island: One of the Most Diverse Landscapes on Earth
Shall we start with a stereotypical Hawaiian beach?One can certainly be forgiven for thinking that Hawai'i is a group of high-rise hotels next to a wide sandy beach. It isn't as if a string of...
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Monday's Minor Mystery Solved Pretty Quickly: Poles with no Shadows in Hawai'i
You can't mystify scientists of the Earth with questions of latitude. I had numerous answers pretty darn quick about why this stop sign reveals my location. The sign pole is casting no shadow! The only...
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When You Say "He's Older Than the Hills" and You're Right....Pu'u Pua'i in...
It's true! I am two years older than the mountain behind me. This is Pu'u Pua'i, a cinder cone that grew during the Kilauea Iki eruptions of 1959 in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of...
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Random Nature Notes from Hawai'i: The Land Reptiles of the Big Island
Reptiles (aside from sea turtles) are probably not native to the Hawaiian Islands but there are quite a few of them on the islands today. Some were brought by the original Polynesian settlers (four...
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Pele is a Capricious Goddess...Today She Dispensed a Gift
Halemaumau, on the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, is a crater within a caldera that has been simmering away for most of the last seven years. The pit is around 600 feet across, and a few hundred feet down...
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The Hawai'i That Was: A New Blog Series
Source: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2644b.htmThere's a rock in the sea about 500 miles northwest of Honolulu. It's about as far removed from the beaches and high-rises of Waikiki as any...
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The Hawai'i That Was: To know what was we need to know Hawai'i today
Na Mokupuni O Hawaii Nei-Kalama 1837 (Source: http://imagesofoldhawaii.com/simon-peter-kalama/)To understand the Hawai'i that was, we need to know the Hawai'i that is. There can be a bit of confusion...
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The Hawai'i That Was: Why Should We Care?
Lapakahi State Park on the Big Island is the remains of an ancient fishing village that was occupied for hundreds of years. Not a single plant in the picture is native to Hawai'i.In a lot of ways, a...
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The Hawai'i That Was: The Beginning of All Things, (Ba)salt of the Earth
There are lots of places that are associated with a particular kind of rock. There's the granite of the Sierra Nevada, or the sandstone of Zion National Park. Geologists think Franciscan graywacke...
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Scenes from a Strawberry Solstice on the Tuolumne River
Tonight was a unique astronomical event, a Strawberry Moon on a summer solstice, the first since I was a child back in 1967. There's nothing significant in this other than human number-keeping, but it...
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The Hawai'i That Was: The Abode of the Gods and Creation at Kilauea
The ongoing eruptive activity at the summit caldera of Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawai'i.You aren’t hearing this from me (well, okay, you are), but sometimes teaching is just a little bit like...
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The Hawai'i That Was: Walking a Lake of Fire in "the Little Source of Great...
Kilauea Iki eruption in 1959. The prevailing winds caused debris to pile up behind the fountain, forming the Pu'u Pau'i cinder cone. Source: US Geological SurveyKilauea is one of the five major shield...
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The Hawai'i That Was: Pu'u O'o, the Volcano We Couldn't See
The Pu'u O'o cone from above HiloDisclaimer: This is NOT happening right now! These pictures are from 2009.Pu'u O'o is the invisible volcano on the Big Island. It's been the center of eruptive activity...
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