Kaʻū News Briefs, Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022

    Author Robin George Andrews notes that a team from California Institute of Technology took on the challenge of understanding more. "While the Pāhala quake storm was a chance to unearth the island's buried magmatic treasure, scientists alone would not be able to identify many of the individual quakes in that cacophony, especially the more commonplace smaller ones that could be

The scientists' cartoon of chambers of magma under Pāhala. Image from the journal Science

smothered by bigger bangs."
    The Caltech team "fed the entire recording of the seismic storm to a machine learning program," writes Andrews. The team employed a technique already used to identify millions of hidden quakes in California. "The program quickly taught itself what was a real quake and what was extraneous noise, then identified and characterized thousands of temblors that would have been missed by conventional seismic signal detection programs and their human analysts."
    "From November 2018 to April 2022, the system logged around 192,000 quakes below Pāhala. Plotting these luminiferous points on a map, the team was stunned to discover a collection of pulsing magmatic structures - the beating volcanic heart of southern Hawai'i. "
    The story says that "When the sinuous structures first came into view on the computer, Caltech graduate student John Wilding's jaw dropped." Wilding told The Washington Post: "I was thinking that it's a part of the Earth that, in this moment, I was the only person on the planet who knew these things were there."
    The study by Wilding and colleagues was published Thursday in the journal Science. The Washington Post reports, "The giant feature described in the paper is made up of several elongated chambers named sills. When eruptions drain magma from the shallow reservoirs above, these deep seated sills seem to react. A cacophony of quakes signals when individual chambers begin to fill with molten rock at different times, a bit like 'blood rushing into a heart,'" said Wilding.
    See The Washington Post story entitled 'Mind-blowing' network of magma chambers found under Hawai'i's volcanoes at https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/12/22/hawaii-volcanoes-magma-chambers/
    See the study in the journal Science entitled The magmatic web beneath Hawai'i at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade5755

To read comments, add your own, and like this story, see facebook.com/kaucalendar. See latest print edition at kaucalendar.com.

A SMALL WILDFIRE IN VOLCANO was 70 percent contained early Thursday evening. A statement from the Park said it is located in a remote wilderness area and sparked by lightening. A 15-person National Park Service wildland firefighting team, assisted by David Okita and his helicopter, doused flames and mopped up Thursday in steep, rocky terrain below the Hilina Pali Lookout. "The burn area contains remnant dryland ‘ōhiʻa trees and native shrubs but is otherwise  dominated by alien grasses