Volcano Watch —With a little help from our friends: Volunteers contribute to HVO's success

From the expedition of Frank Perret and E.S. Shepherd in 1911 to the present day, volunteers have willingly and enthusiastically helped with many important experiments and observations at HVO.

During his 1911 expedition, Perret oversaw the construction of a wire cable suspended across Halema‘uma‘u Crater from which a sampling bucket and a thermal probe could be lowered. The experiment required the help of Lorrin A. Thurston, his wife, and his children to handle the cable and to relay communications from one side of the crater to the other. The Thurston family may have been HVO's first volunteers.

In another notable experiment in 1917, Thomas Jaggar, founder of HVO, directed nine volunteers to maneuver a 200-foot long, half-inch diameter pipe into the lava lake and pull it back out two times. With each attempt, the pipe encountered increasing resistance until the pipe arched upward and would go no farther. Jaggar described the results as encountering an "impenetrable pudding" on the bottom of the lake at a depth of 50 feet.

Today, volunteers continue to provide valuable support to HVO operations. Each year, we are fortunate to have volunteer help from a number of U.S. and foreign students. After spending a few months working alongside HVO scientists, many have gone on to pursue advanced degrees and scientific careers.

But HVO volunteers are not limited to students. Nancy Ikeda, a math professor from Fullerton Community College, California, is currently here on her second stint as a volunteer in HVO's library and photo archive. One result of her assistance is a published collection of photos documenting the effects of the 2006 Kīholo Bay earthquake.

HVO has also benefitted greatly from long-term volunteer efforts of Hawai‘i Island residents. One of the longest serving volunteers is Ben Gaddis, who first volunteered during the Mauna Ulu eruption in 1973 and continued through the Mauna Loa eruption in 1984 as much as his Hilo attorney practice would allow. In 2008, when Ben "mostly retired" as a Family Court Judge, he volunteered again for several HVO projects, involving digital preservation of old records and photos.

Ben and retired Judge Frances Wong of Honolulu teamed together to collect and scan Jaggar's daily Record Books (1912 to 1955). He has also become quite a sleuth at finding historical images and is in the process of inventorying and annotating photographs of past volcanic activity archived at Bishop Museum, Hawaii State Archives, Lyman Museum, and the University of Hawai‘i.

Another volunteer, the late Kent Warshauer, also known as the "Sugar Mill Spy," collected old newspaper articles about Hawai‘i earthquakes, eruptions, tsunamis, and other topics related to natural phenomena to augment HVO's records. His legacy remains in the form of an entire shelf of binders filled with copies of these articles in the HVO library.

Volunteer Andrew Hara, a professional photographer from Hilo, provides invaluable assistance in HVO's photo archive. His most recent accomplishment involved scanning and digitally cleaning many of the older prints that were part of an HVO Centennial exhibit at the East Hawai‘i Cultural Center.

Marcie Frenz, a retired educator from Hilo, volunteers at HVO one to two days a week transferring data on earthquakes felt in Hawai‘i from index cards to a digital database that now holds almost 10,000 records.

Volunteer work is not limited to data preservation. Long-time volunteers Frank Box of Volcano and Clyde Shiraki of Mountain View were instrumental in HVO's recent seismic network upgrades during the last several years, which sometimes required working at remote locations on Kīlauea and Mauna Loa.

We are profoundly grateful for the current and past volunteer contributions to HVO's century of operations and research and hope that we can continue to attract residents and students to our many opportunities.

The final Volcano Awareness Month talk by HVO scientists in January will be a presentation about Kīlauea's volcanic gas emissions and vog at the Kīlauea Visitor Center in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park on January 31. For more information, please visit HVO's website.

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Volcano Activity Update

A lava lake present within the Halema‘uma‘u Overlook vent during the past week resulted in night-time glow that was visible from the Jaggar Museum overlook. The lake, which is normally about 100–125 m (330–410 ft) below the floor of Halema‘uma‘u Crater and visible by HVO's Webcam, rose and fell slightly during the week in response to a series of large deflation-inflation cycles. It reached a relatively high level this past week, due to summit inflation, but was still 80 m (260 ft) below the crater floor.

On Kīlauea's east rift zone, surface lava flows were active in the upper part of the flow field, about 3.5 km (2.2 miles) southeast of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō, over the past week. The flow field on the coastal plain remains inactive after activity stalled there a month ago, and there is no active ocean entry. Occasional short lava flows and a small lava pond have been observed over the past week within Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō crater.

Two earthquakes beneath Hawai‘i Island were reported felt this past week. A magnitude-4.7 earthquake occurred at 4:36 p.m. on Sunday, January 22, 2012, HST, and was located 8 km (5 mi) south of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō Crater at a depth of 8 km (5 mi). A magnitude-2.0 earthquake occurred at 00:24 a.m. on Tuesday, January 24, and was located 1 km (1 mi) northwest of Pu‘ulena Crater at a depth of 1 km (1 mi).