Ka`u Calendar News Briefs Sunday, June 26, 2016

KA`U'S REP. TULSI GABBARD AND A BIPARTISAN group of Congress members introduced legislation to prevent the sale of firearms to those on the No-Fly list in an effort to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, while providing an appeals process to protect constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties.

      “We owe it to the American people to work together to try to get sensible gun control legislation actually passed – and in order to do that, it must be a bipartisan effort,” Gabbard said. “Majorities in both parties agree with the vast majority of the American people – we need to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists. However, we must also ensure that any action we take does not compromise the rights to due process guaranteed to every citizen. There are valid constitutional concerns related to the lack of due process and transparency for those who have mistakenly been placed on the No Fly List and Terror Watch List. This legislation is a bipartisan compromise that will help to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, while protecting our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties.”

THE GREAT CRACK and other features of Kilauea’s Southwest Rift Zone are topics of the current issue of Hawaiian Volcano Observatory’s Volcano Watch.

USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory scientists investigate a portion of the Great Crack. Photo from USGS/HVO

      “In 1823, the party of English Reverend William Ellis (1794-1872), including American missionary Asa Thurston and a number of local guides, explored the wild landscape of Kilauea Volcano,” the article states. “Ellis returned with his ailing wife to a family home in London where, in 1824, he began writing up a detailed and important narrative of his journey around the Island of Hawai`i. No other Caucasian visitors had published descriptions of this landscape, and one could say that the ‘history’ of Ka`u and, more broadly, of Kilauea, in the sense of contemporary written documentation, begins with Ellis.

      “The Ellis account (first published in 1825) is significant for several reasons. Not only is it pioneering, it also provides the first European descriptions of active, or recently active, eruptions at Kilauea. A lake – or several lakes – of molten lava spread across the floor of the summit caldera; an awesome spectacle that underscored Hawaiian cultural respect for Pelehonuamea, the volcano deity. 

      “On the western flank of Kilauea, Ellis and company also witnessed the aftermath of a recent outpouring of highly fluid lava, which geologist Harold Stearns, a hundred years later, officially designated the ‘Keaiwa Flow’ (an informal name used by residents of Ka`u at the time). The 1823 flow issued from a 10-kilometer (six-mile) long rupture now known as the Great Crack, and poured into the ocean, destroying one small coastal village at Mahuka Bay.
      “Explosive eruptions occurred at Kilauea’s summit in the decades before Ellis arrived. The 1790 eruption is foremost, but at least seven others, unnoticed by Ellis, took place between then and the early 1820s. Ellis was told about the 1790 eruption but not about the later ones, evidence for which has only recently been discovered.

      “On the west flank (Southwest Rift Zone) of Kilauea, the general assumption made by historians is that nothing much occurred there volcanically in the decades surrounding the unusual 1823 eruption described by Ellis. This assumption, however, is questionable given what we’ve learned in recent years about unreported summit activity. 

      “Ongoing studies have tackled the question of what may be missing from the late 18th to early to mid-19th-century historical record. They use both the Footprints ash, a deposit of the 1790 eruption that fell in part of the area, and the Ellis narrative, which includes important details of how the Ka`u landscape looked back then, to distinguish younger flows from older ones.

William Ellis Photo from wikipedia

      “The geological interpretation of early accounts is daunting, but critical. We cannot reliably reconstruct the route of the Ellis party in terms of his reported travel distances, most of which are more than double what could possibly be true. But directions of travel – the party carried a compass – do seem to be reliable, allowing us to trace a partial route based on descriptions of features that have not changed much in two centuries.
      “Another challenge is descriptive terminology. The terms Ellis and his contemporaries used often had less clear, more poetic meanings than the scientific terms we use today. Much specific terminology we now routinely use simply did not exist then, nor would it be used today by a non-scientist, such as Ellis. We have to guess what Ellis meant by his sometimes colorful terms, and at times we may be wrong in our guess.
      “What has been learned so far is that Kilauea’s Southwest Rift Zone produced far more lava in the decades between 1790 and 1823 than Ellis alone suggests – and from fissures more widespread than only the Great Crack. We suspect this because there are many flows that are not covered by the Footprints ash. The flows instead overlie the ash, and, therefore, are younger than 1790.
      “Care must be taken in our analyses, however, because erosion can remove thin ash quite easily, and the ash in this area was probably thin. Nonetheless, we favor the interpretation that lava flows that lack an ash cover are indeed younger than the ash.
      “The Ellis narrative is a ‘snapshot’ and not a running documentary of Kilauea during his time. In a future column we’ll explore this surprising discovery further.
     “Meanwhile, the engagement of written history and geology, two ordinarily separated academic disciplines, has – once more – proven unexpectedly fruitful in our understanding of Hawai`i’s natural environment.”
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TUTU & ME TRAVELING PRESCHOOL is looking for two part-time, on-call teaching assistants to assist in implementing its curriculum for caregivers and keiki during the 2016-17 school year beginning Aug. 1.

Miho Aida Photo from VAC

VOLCANO ART CENTER in Volcano Village presents a film screening and book signing tomorrow at 7 p.m. Miho Aida screens her film The Sacred Place Where Life Begins: Gwich’in Women Speak and signs copies of the book We Are the Arctic.

      See volcanoartcenter.org.

COUNTY OFFICIALS DISCUSS the planned Ocean View Transfer Station with residents Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Ocean View Community Center.
     Call 939-7033 for more information.

THE EVOLUTION OF LANDSCAPE Restoration at Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park is the topic at After Dark in the Park Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Kilauea Visitor Center Auditorium in Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park.
      Since its establishment in 1916, various attempts to conserve and protect the park’s rich biological resources have been made by the Territory of Hawai`i, the National Park Service, and citizen scientists – with varying degrees of success. Beginning in 1970, park staff adopted a systematic parkwide approach to managing species and habitats, which continues today. Join Chief of Natural Resource Management Dr. Rhonda Loh to learn more about these Special Ecological Areas, or SEAs, and decades of successful restoration in the park.

SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS AT PAHALAPLANTATIONCOTTAGES.COM AND KAUCOFFEEMILL.COM. KA`U COFFEE MILL IS OPEN SEVEN DAYS A WEEK.

See kaucalendar.com/KauCalendar_June2016.pdf.

See kaucalendar.com/TheDirectory2016.html and kaucalendar.com/TheDirectory2016.pdf.