Category: USGS Talk/Meeting

July 24: Steve Brantley Talk at Pahoa Community Meeting

USGS/HVO Deputy Scientist-in-Charge Steve Brantley has been giving weekly 10-minute slideshows at Tuesday evening Pahoa Community Meetings. Here’s last Tuesday’s.

Transcript:

Good evening. Thank you for coming out tonight. I have just a short presentation to provide for you this evening, and I invite you to come back to the back of the room at the end of the meeting. I have copies of the report that we put out on Thursday of last week, so you’re welcome to take a copy. Please, one per household. And I’ll draw attention to—  the centerpiece of that report is a map. And I have a copy of the map back there that we can talk about if you’d like.

So the activity this past week has not changed significantly, either at Fissure 8 or along the lava channel or at the summit. The summit keeps dropping during these episodic earthquakes, where parts of the crater floor drop 2-2 ½ meters, 7-8 feet at a time, and also overall slow subsidence.

Continue reading July 24: Steve Brantley Talk at Pahoa Community Meeting

July 17: Steve Brantley USGS Talk at Pahoa

Here’s a transcript of this week’s presentation from HVO Deputy-Scientist-in-Charge Steve Brantley at the Tuesday Pahoa Community Meeting.

I’m going to start with a broad overview of the eruption so far. We’re 80 days into the eruption [since the floor dropped on Puʻu ʻŌʻō, I think] about now, so I want to provide a little bit of context, in terms of similar activity or un-similar activity in the past 200 years. And then we’ll do a quick summary of what’s happened in the past week.

Continue reading July 17: Steve Brantley USGS Talk at Pahoa

July 10: Steve Brantley USGS Talk at Pahoa Meeting

Transcript of Steve Brantley’s Tuesday evening presentation at the weekly community meeting, July 10, 2018.

Steve Brantley (HVO/USGS): Well, good evening. Thank you for turning out. I worked really hard this afternoon to prepare my very best presentation for you tonight, and lo and behold, somehow it didn’t end up on my jump drive. So for that, I apologize. And what I’ll do is basically recount the presentation, but you’ll have to— we can refer to the map up here.

July 10, 2018, noon USGS map of lava flows. (Full-sized)

So the overall picture is that the activity at Fissure 8 has not fundamentally changed. A high rate of lava is still being erupted, and we really haven’t noticed a change in that rate. At the summit, the volcano continues to subside very slowly over time, and periodically— now about once every 30 hours, or almost every day— the ground drops as much as two and a half meters or so in each drop, and results in a ground shaking that’s equivalent to about a magnitude 5 event.

Continue reading July 10: Steve Brantley USGS Talk at Pahoa Meeting

July 3 Steve Brantley Slideshow at Pahoa Meeting

[Note: this is when the overflows around Kapoho Crater got started, but the main flow front/ocean entry was still mostly north.]

I was hoping NLTV would post a video of last Tuesday evening’s Pahoa Community meeting as they usually do, since BigIslandVideoNews records Steve Brantley’s slideshows by pointing the camera at him and skipping most of the slides, but no such luck.

BIVN posted various excerpts of the meeting, including these non-geology segments: Live poll, Hwy 130 Reopening Discussed, Residents question Civil Defense. 

Here’s Steve Brantley’s USGS presentation:

Transcript

Steve Brantley, Deputy Scientist-in-Charge of HVO:

Continue reading July 3 Steve Brantley Slideshow at Pahoa Meeting

July 5: Volcano Community Meeting

Informing the public without panicking them about an extremely unlikely but life-threatening hazard is tricky. So it’s taken the USGS a while to release this document which they’ve been promising the residents of Volcano:

On HVO website: Volcanic Hazard at the Summit of Kīlauea Update [summary: “This document is a guide for understanding current activity and hazard at and around the summit of Kīlauea Volcano. Here, we summarize activity from late April through the present, detail possible future outcomes, and review hazards associated with these outcomes.”]  Presumably it’s called an “update” because it supplements the June 26 “Frequently Asked Questions About Kīlauea Volcano’s Summit Earthquakes” FAQ. [EDIT: No, actually, it’s an update to the May 8th “Preliminary Analysis of Current Explosion Hazards at the Summit“]

This was the chief topic of Thursday’s Volcano Village meeting, led not by the National Park Service this time, but by Civil Defense Administrator Tal Magno.

Here’s the FULL video of the meeting. BigIslandVideoNews excerpted the most important part, HVO Scientist-in-Charge Tina Neal’s 4-minute talk:

Partial Transcript

Continue reading July 5: Volcano Community Meeting

June 28: USGS on Latest Changes to Kīlauea Caldera [Pt. 3 of 3]

This post got long, so I’ve moved the Q&A session to Part 3. Again, I’m transcribing what HVO geologists had to say at the June 28 Volcano Village community meeting.

Part 1 was Kyle Anderson’s talk on seismicity and ground deformation— lots of nitty gritty science— while Part 2 was Don Swanson’s slideshow of some of the visible changes he’s observed within Kīlauea Caldera, with a lot of photos I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Here’s the video of the whole meeting.

Here’s my transcription of the Q&A session. A lot of these questions have already been answered online, but I like hearing direct, personal responses from some of the senior HVO scientists:

Continue reading June 28: USGS on Latest Changes to Kīlauea Caldera [Pt. 3 of 3]

June 28: USGS Talk on Latest Changes to Kīlauea Caldera [Pt. 2 of 3]

This continues my transcription of the Thurs Jun 28 USGS presentation at Volcano Village. Part 1 transcribed HVO Scientist-in-Charge Tina Neal and seismologist Kyle Anderson’s remarks. Part 2 covers senior volcanologist and my longtime hero Don Swanson’s remarks.

Here’s the video of the entire 1.5 hour meeting. Don’s presentation starts at 15:50:

It sounds like Swanson’s been holed up in Volcano House after HVO was evacuated. (Kyle Anderson: “Don has spent more time viewing this eruption from the summit than anyone else.”)

Title of talk: “Comparisons of Halemaʻumaʻu Crater, May 19 through June 28
Viewed from dining room table of Volcano House”

Don Swanson, geologist, USGS

[15:50] Thanks, Kyle.

The data that Kyle showed are absolutely magnificent. What I want to do now is to show you some photographs of features that I’ve been able to see during my observations. The first will be a series of photographs of Halemaʻumaʻu taken from the seat in the dining room of the Volcano House hotel where I sit and observe things.

Screencap of first slide in Don Swanson’s presentation. In USGS archives: [May 19] [June 13]
On May 19th, of course, things were just starting to get going, but over here on June 13th, you can see that the crater has widened dramatically, and notice that it’s also dropped to the top of the tree which was way below the— it’s come way down. It isn’t because the tree is growing! It’s because the crater is dropping down.

Now we’ll go to this next period, June 13th to the 17th.

Continue reading June 28: USGS Talk on Latest Changes to Kīlauea Caldera [Pt. 2 of 3]

June 28: USGS Talk on Latest Changes to Kilauea Caldera [Pt. 1 of 3]

On Thursday, there was an hour and a half meeting with the USGS, National Park Service and residents of Volcano Village. Above is a video of the whole meeting. As usual, I’m interested in the geology, and so I’ve made a transcript of that part of the meeting. The first half of Kyle Anderson’s talk rehashes the “collapse/explosion” events that we’ve covered before, but the second half has a timelapse of Halema’uma’u from June 1st to June 28th — which I’ve rebuilt frame by frame, since I could just make out the timestamps— plus the latest Digital Elevation Model of Kilauea’s summit showing the slumping not only in Halema’uma’u, but across part of the caldera floor.

Scientist-in-Charge Tina Neal (HVO)

[5:40] [Introductory remarks, greetings and thanks]

[6:20] So tonight you’ll hear from familiar faces, Kyle Anderson and Don Swanson, who will give you an update on what the volcano is doing, what we think is happening, and we’ll touch on this very important question of how long and how big. Those are very hard questions to answer, so let me just preview that we’re not going to give you a wonderful take-away that will solve all that uncertainty. But we’ll do the best we can.

Continue reading June 28: USGS Talk on Latest Changes to Kilauea Caldera [Pt. 1 of 3]

June 26: Steve Brantley’s Tuesday USGS Presentation

On June 26, 2018, Deputy Scientist-in-Chief of the Hawaii Volcano Observatory, Steve Brantley, gave a ten-minute slideshow at the Puna Community Meeting in Pahoa. Video of the meeting is posted here. Steve Brantley’s talk starts at 35:00 in that video.

BigIslandVideoNews excerpted half of his talk in this video, which they overlaid with footage from a June 24 USGS drone overflight of the summit:

Below is my transcript of the complete talk, including images that match or approximate his slides.

Steve Brantley (USGS):

Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming out.

I’ll just describe a few things occurring in the Lower East Rift Zone and then summarize the activity up at the summit at the very end.

Continue reading June 26: Steve Brantley’s Tuesday USGS Presentation

June 19: Steve Brantley USGS Talk on Eruption Status

On Tuesday, June 19, there was a Puna Community Meeting at Pahoa High School at 5pm. As usual, Steve Brantley of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory/USGS gave an excellent slide presentation reviewing the current state of the Kilauea eruiption. He covered the “perched lava flow” in the Lower Rift Zone and the dramatic changes at the summit, placing each in context with previous similar events. (I didn’t realize there were records of many past Halema’uma’u collapses).

Video of the entire meeting is posted here. The USGS talk starts at 42:40. I’ve transcribed it below, adding photos when I have something close (and restoring his graphs/diagrams which don’t come through very well on video recording).

Steve Brantley, HVO/USGS:

Continue reading June 19: Steve Brantley USGS Talk on Eruption Status