Wet, Wet, Wet

[Title with apologies to a band I never got into, but I know my college roommate liked them.]

Autumn has been gaining hold lately, with colder winds, rainy spells, and generally unsettled weather. I don’t understand weather well enough, but unsettled weather on Kauai means there are also periods when there are almost no clouds. When the sky is clear, the nights can be almost chilly in the 60’s (16-20 C), and that usually leads to rain when the sun warms the moist air. But it does give glimpses of Waialeale in the early morning before the clouds form.

But last Saturday was particularly rainy here on Kauai when a Kona storm moved through in the early morning. In the fall and winter, the tradewinds die down, and weather can come from the south and south-west, or from the district called Kona on most islands.

The morning started out clear, and looking east to where the tradewinds usually bring us our weather showed nothing alarming. Then it started getting dark again, and I saw a few grey clouds. When it really got so dark I had to turn the lights back on, I looked out south-west over the head of the Sleeping Giant and saw the black clouds rolling in. The rains came with a bit of thunder and lasted off and on all day and into the night. At dusk I saw some lightning, a relatively rare sight here in the tropics because of the humidity.

In the end, I measured 2 inches of rain by the next morning in the Wailua Houselots where I live, a generally drier slice of land close to the coast (average annual rainfall is around 50 inches or 125 cm). That’s the first rainfall significantly over one inch (2.5cm) in almost exactly a year, and the most in 24 hours since the infamous rains of March 2006.

Conclusions:

• For tourists, the beginning of November is often rainy on Kauai.
• For hikers, it’s wet and muddy on the trails right now, all over the island. The inland areas already got wet in October, so now they will be soggy. When the sun does come out, it doesn’t make the trail dry, it makes the air muggy.

Checking out some other blogs around the state, one of them reported this storm in real-time, and another mention the power outages in downtown Honolulu (glad to know it’s not just our rural island that suffers from these—schadenfreude). But best of all, the Honolulu Advertiser published this photo of snow on the Big Island (see also these older photos from the Mauna Kea Weather Center).

Image source: Honolulu Advertiser

By the way, I’m still looking for anecdotal or photographic evidence of snow on Kauai.

Stupid Ferry

One unique character of Hawaii is that each island has evolved in the motoring age without the benefit of vehicular passage between the islands. This makes each island so much more independent and unique due to the limited movement of people and goods. For example, there are very few RVs (camping-cars) blocking the roads on Kauai because residents don’t need them and nobody can bring them here easily. More importantly, while Oahu might have nearly one million residents, Kauai is not over-run with city-dwellers on weekends.

Now, the so-called “super” ferry wants to change all that, not to mention harm our fragile ocean and island eco-systems in the process. After several years of lobbying, the ferry project has been granted a license to operate by the governor’s administration, without any preliminary study about how it will impact the people or environment of Hawaii. As details about the size (350 feet / 105 m long and 11 feet/ 3.5 m draft) and high speed (35 knots / 40 mph / 65 kmh) of the ferry were made available and people realized what it really means to have a ferry, much opposition has developed on Kauai and Maui (the Big Island is spared until 2009). Concerned citizens have created the website superferryimpact.com to raise awareness about the many ways in which a ferry would negatively impact Kauai.

With service scheduled to begin in July of this year, the state legislature finally looked into the matter and drafted bills to require the studies. This is my letter in support of those laws, with some links added.

TO: Chair, Hermina Morita, Energy & Environmental Committee
  Vice-Chair, Mele Carroll, Energy & Environmental Committee

RE: In favor of HB702, requiring Environmental Impact Statement on Hawaii Superferry

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT ON HAWAII SUPEREFERRY, being heard 2-1-2007, 0800, Room 312, House side, State Capitol.

Testimony:

Aloha,

The so-called “super” ferry represents such a change in how people and goods will move between the islands that no state harbor improvements should be made for the ferry before an environmental impact study (EIS) has been done.

For me, the most serious impact to consider is the danger to the whales. The ferry will travel at over 40 miles per hour, and whales are often near the surface. The newspaper today contained an article about a “speeding” cruise ship in Alaska killing a whale, and the ferry vessel will travel even faster. Imagine the effect that one whale death will have on the growing eco-tourism market in Hawaii. Even if ferry activity were limited to the summer months when the whales are in Alaska, what about green turtles, also an endangered species?

I am also worried about invasive species, both plants and animals, spreading between islands. Dealing with the coqui frog on Kaua’i has wasted thousands of hours of work and will cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars. Weeds are choking our forests and their seeds can easily hitch a ride on vehicles. The ferry spokespeople claim vehicles will be cleaned, but an EIS will mandate how to do it thoroughly. Finally, I’ve heard callous people claim that the only solution to Kaua’i’s chicken “problem” is to import the mongoose so readily seen on other islands. How does the ferry intend to protect against such a calamity that would decimate the island’s native bird population, including the nene?

Any type of ferry is also sure to cause economic and social impacts. The fact of the matter is that neighbor islands have developed an economy and society that does not rely on vehicular travel between the islands. Given the population imbalance between the islands, the ferry will certainly affect issues such as traffic, over-crowding, and crime much more on the neighbor islands than on Oahu.

An Oahu resident might not mind sitting in Kapa’a rush hour traffic instead of that on the H-1, but local residents are sure to feel the additional surge of traffic. Even though vehicles will come and go on the ferry, there will undeniably be more passenger-miles driven on Kaua’i, and most of it will be concentrated on weekends, the only time many residents have to enjoy their parks and beaches.

Overcrowding at said parks and beaches is therefore also an issue. Neighbor island counties already have limited resources to maintain their parks and hire lifeguards. An influx of users, in addition to the crowds of tourists, will degrade the experience for everyone. I also think that Oahu’s homelessness problem will be exported to Kaua’i and Maui, creating a further burden on those counties.

The ferry website does not address how drugs and criminals will be prevented from traveling between islands. Unless an impact statement can identify solutions such as photo identification checks and video surveillance, what will keep fugitives, criminals and illegal drugs such as “ice” from spreading to the neighbor islands on the ferry? What if such measures are unconstitutional?

One last impact that I find galling is the unfairness of the advertised ferry schedules towards neighbor island residents. With late departures and overnight stop-overs, it is obvious that the schedules all favor Oahu residents and happen to inconvenience neighbor island residents. An impact study might suggest how all residents could benefit equally from the ferry.

Perhaps an economic impact study is necessary as well, in order to see if the inevitable cost of all the environmental mitigation measures is even justified. What are the benefits to private individuals and groups when compared to flying and renting a car or bus? What are be benefits to businesses given the advertised rates, and are those benefits equal for neighbor island businesses given the disadvantageous schedules? What are the potential revenues, direct or indirect, to the state that justify the outlay for the harbor improvements? What if the ferry business is not successful, can the state be reimbursed for the harbor improvements that directly benefited the ferry?

All the environmental and economic risks also need to be weighed along with the potential disruption of current island lifestyles, existing businesses, and current harbor users. That’s why I ask you to please enact this legislation to require impact studies before any harbor construction or ferry service can begin.

Mahalo.

Distant Island Neighbors

Update: I wrote this post without realizing it’s Geography Awareness Week.

I’ve always had a passion for geography and maps. I love to just “read” an atlas, looking at details on maps and trying to imagine what life would be like in remote places. For the longest time, I wanted a globe, and now I have two above my desk (not so I can see both sides of the earth at once, but because they were $1 each at a garage sale). Now, the Google Earth application lets me play with a virtual globe with all the benefits of placemarkers and zooming in to incredible detail (see the KML links below that work when you have Google Earth installed on your computer).

When I lived near mountains, I was interested in distant mountain ranges; now that I live on an island, I like to search for far-flung islands that stand out by their isolation and striking features. I am fascinated by small islands, and I see them as microcosms, finite enough (fractals and scuba excluded) that I can wrap my mind around them, perhaps even know “everything” about them. It helps if the island has an exotic or foreboding name, and it’s always a bonus if there is some good maritime story in the island’s history.

Source: Aceduline on flickr.com

One place that combines mountains and glaciers (and my francophilia) on a remote island is the Kerguelen group. I always wanted to blog about it, as a sort of antipode to Hawaii—and it is practically on the other side of the earth, but somebody beat me to it. Check out that link for a brief description, and links to more photos and information.

The problem is that after reading that article, I spent three hours exploring Google Earth and looking for islands. I’ve read a lot about the South Pacific islands, so I focused on the South Atlantic about which I knew almost nothing. By comparison, the Pacific seems relatively well inhabited. Just so that time is not completely wasted, here’s what I found:

• Wikipedia calls Tristan de Cunha the most remote inhabited island, although I’d be interested in their definition of remote (closest people, closest island, closest larger island, or closest continent?) and inhabited (temporary, permanent, non-scientific?). A nearby island is called Inaccessible, and indeed it was not fully explored until recently.
• Gough Island (once known as Diego Alvarez) should qualify as obscure, being administered by Tristan de Cunha 800 miles away, itself a 1350-mile dependency of St. Helena, an oversees territory of the UK. The photos on this site make it look very Hawaiian, though I imagine the climate is quite different. The only inhabitants are South Africans who run a permanent weather station there [KML] (that view makes me think of the game Myst).
• The British equivalent of Kerguelen is South Georgia, over which the Falklands war was started (among others). Having skiied cross country on a mountain-top glacier in France (Glacier de la Vanoise, not a picture of me), I began to understand what these places must look like.

Source: Google Earth
• Mimicking Gough administratively are the South Sandwich Islands, far removed from South Georgia, itself once dependent on the Falklands. They form a quite regular crescent in the South Atlantic, some 250 miles long. Only one pair of them, including Vindication Island, is visible in high-resolution in Google Earth [KML] (note the icebergs dotting the ocean there).

  Update: National Geographic Magazine has a full article on the South Georgia in their December 2006 issue with photos and video online.

• In the other Sandwich Islands named by Captain Cook, Nihoa Island (above) is only 150 miles from Kaua’i but lacks rain and therefore much vegetation. It was once inhabited, perhaps seasonally, but access is restricted now as part of the new Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument (3MB PDF, with maps).
  
  Source: http://atsea.nmfs.hawaii.edu/islands/nihoa.htm, photo by George H. Balazs

• Then there are all the “rocks” that stick out of the oceans in random places. While you don’t expect to see these in Google Earth, Wikipedia often has photos of these incredibly remote places. Shag Rocks are 240 km from South Georgia mentioned above. The well-named Rockall is 300 km from Scotland but has a satirical newspaper online. And Hawaii’s entry in this category, the Gardner Pinnacles, are the remains of a volcanic island perhaps once the size of the Big Island now in the process of becoming just an atoll.

Amateur Geology

An updated map from USGS shows the large aftershock which didn’t appear as large on the first map. The magnitude of both has been revised upwards, now listed as 6.7 at 7:07am and 6.0 at 7:14am.

Source (dynamic): http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/Maps/HI2/19.21.-157.-155.php

Both earthquakes were deep (18 and 12 mi–29 and 19 km–below sea level I imagine, so somewhat less below the sea floor), and I’ve heard them attributed to the earth’s crust being strained and crackling beneath the weight of the volcano. That may sound surprising until you realize that Mauna Loa (”Long Mountain”) is more massive than many entire mountain ranges. One study estimates the volume of the island (or maybe just the one volcano–it’s not clear which) to be in the range of “68,750 to 79,343 cubic kilometers, or 16,494 to 19,035 cubic miles.”

And not only does the volcano rise from the sea floor which averages around 18,000′ (very roughly 6000 m) deep, its weight depresses the sea floor even deeper at the center of the island (just like you sink into a water bed). So the same study estimates the tip-to-tip height of Mauna Loa at 10.56 miles (17km), significantly more than the 6 miles (10km) usually measured from the sea floor.

Source: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/photos/mauna.jpg

This whole explanation of the mass of the volcano is a sort of tangent, but it all makes sense if you look at where the earthquakes happened on the graphic above, as indicated by the yellow squares I added (those are the epicenters, I imagine the hypocenters were located on the downward sloping curve of the crust under the volcano mass). The earthquakes occurred below an underwater extension of the island, furthest away from the hotspot now at Kilauea volcano and in the direction that the plate is moving and forming the Hawaiian chain. If you imagine all the plate tectonics and volcanism as an interaction of fluids with differing surface tensions, this is the point where the “fountain” of volcanic rock is falling back towards the crust. So it is here that the mass of the volcano is most unsupported and weighing down on the crust away from the upswelling at the hot spot.

All this is pure speculation on my part, an educated guess if you will. However, in researching and thinking about all these geological processes, it has made me realize that there are two factors which “form” a Hawaiian island after it moves off the hot spot. The first that everybody knows about is the erosion of the atmosphere and of the ocean on the volcano’s pile of rock. The second is the interaction of the volcano’s mass with the crust beneath it and with itself, causing the volcano to subside and flatten out. This second one is often beyond our imagination because it deals with dimensions and time scales beyond our usual perception.

One reason I am fascinated with all this amateur geology is that I’d love to have an idea of what the proto-Kauai looked like when it was the “big island” of the chain. One hypothesis is that all islands looked similar to the current Big Island when they were over the hot spot. I rather suspect that the interaction of the hotspot and the crust movement and the ocean is akin to the weather: some days you get a lot of rain others not much. That would mean some islands had more mass to start with than others and maybe took longer to erode.

I suspect Kauai was one of the larger ones, because it survives larger and more monolithic than Oahu (one mountain mass versus Oahu’s two main ridges) despite being older. Another clue is the fact that “beyond” Kauai, all the islands are tiny. There is nothing intermediate unless you consider Niihau, but it may have been part of the proto-Kauai just as Lanai and Molokai were likely part of the proto-Maui. So my theory is that Kauai “hogged” the hotspot for a long time, building up a massive volcano, perhaps larger than the current Big Island. We all have dreams of gradeur.

Earthquake!

We were woken up this morning by the earthquatke centered just off the Big Island’s NW Kohala coast. The house shook gently for maybe 10 seconds, the wall hangings banged, one cupboard swung open, but nothing fell or broke. As I was waking up, I thought it was maybe a strong wind buffeting the house but then I realized there was no wind sound. There were actually two earthquakes, we felt the first at 7:11am the second weaker at 7:23am. Those times are approximate, but they are definitely delayed from the “official” times (which I don’t have offhand). We are located 260 miles (415 km) from the epicenter.

Source: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/Maps/special/Hawaii.php

After the first one, we got up, figured there was no danger and went back to bed—since we sleep in on Sundays. I wasn’t quite asleep when I felt what I thought was a tiny aftershock: just a jitter and the neighbor dogs barked once. I told my wife there was an aftershock, and a few seconds later the house shook a little bit for about 5 seconds, much less than the first time. We didn’t feel any of the true aftershocks, and none of them rattled the wall hangings.

Unless there was some strange localized effects, I doubt there was any damage on Kauai. The electricity never went out, so it was a normal day for us. Maybe some rocks fell somewhere, loosened by the recent rains, but we’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper to find out. All the local TV stations from Oahu were not broadcasting at first due to a complete power outage on all the other islands. CNN and Fox news had around the clock coverage at first, but not much to say until reporters from KITV (channel 4) on Oahu were back on the air.

So far, there are reports of rock slides on the Big Island, some bridges out on Maui isolating the town of Hana, and a 100 year-old chimney falling on Oahu, but no deaths. Lots of food spoiled and dishes were broken on the Big Island, bug significant damage was limited to a hospital building, some big roofs on stores, and a few blocked or cracked roads. There were a lot of dry rock walls (no mortar, just stacked rocks) and retaining walls that collapsed, damaging some houses and cars. KITV has more of the story and lots of photos on their website.

We’re not really worried about earthquakes here on Kauai, we know they happen at least every decade on the Big Island because of the volcanism, but like today’s they are not felt stronly here. I think they have tiny quakes on Kauai probably due to the island settling, but I think we have nothing to worry about. Of course, a tsunami is always a threat, but we bought our house uphill about 150′ (50 m) and a mile (1.6 km) from the ocean, on purpose.

Just as an aside, I wonder how long it will take FEMA to update their website:

Source: fema.gov, 14 hours after today’s earthquake