I happened to be on island and got to see it from 5-7am, it was truly a sight to behold, unlike anything else I've seen. Got some cool pictures but of course they really can't do it justice.
Even a mile away we felt some heat! Astounding amount of energy literally spewing from Earths core
Can’t predict the volcano, but I highly recommend a helicopter trip over Kilauea if you have a chance to go. Even if it is not currently erupting, from the air you can see the cooled lava flow paths and it’s clear the massive volume that occasionally flows out.
Normally you are correct, though for the current series of eruptions this year they can often be predicted within a a day or two of accuracy by looking at the micro radians pressure. Once it gets past 12.5, Madame Pēlē is going to start the fountain in short order.
We kept the Kilauea YT stream going 24/7 and just waited till it started and then drove over.
Kilauea has been erupting every week or two since Christmas Eve and fountaining every week or two for two months now.
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The only way I will ride in a chopper is if myself or an immediate family member is being flown to a hospital.
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Multiple sources indicate that helicopters have a higher fatal accident rate compared to cars, with some calculations showing helicopters to be 10 to 85 times more dangerous when comparing based on hours flown.
I don’t care if the probability of failure is lower in a helicopter than automobile. The failure modes for helicopters are all worse than that of an automobile. Chances of dying if something goes wrong is much higher.
Uh, the aircraft safety figure you're probably thinking of only applies to fixed-wing, airline aircraft -- GA, private flights, and helis are more dangerous.
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Sorry for the tangent, but now I'm curious: can you get a paper cut from toilet paper? It doesn't seem to have the same kind of edges.
Probably not. Its just takibg the thread to its most absurd conclusion because the whole thing is absurd.
A rule that has emerged over the years is that if there's some volcano erupting spectacularly, if I book a flight and go fly there, it will immediately stop.
So if anyone would like the lava to cease, just send me a plane ticket...
Tom Scott is that you?
The VOG lately on Oahu has been really bad, desperately hoping we keep tradewinds around. A few weeks ago we had Kona winds and it was nauseating.
Live link is useless link. Nothing to see except steam.
timestamp for "lava more than 1k feet high" please.
thanks. So that would be from 2025-06-20 01:54:00 HST (Hawaii Standard Time) and onwards.
Big Island is an extremely interesting place. Its just few kilometers wide but it has around 8 climate zones ranging from snow, desert, volcano, tropical, beaches, rainforest what not. You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.
There is one public bus that goes around and once I was the only passenger and the driver stopped the bus near the ocean to show the travelling whales/dolphins.
You must be thinking of a different island. Hawaii, the Big Island is big. 93 miles long, 76 miles wide. Maui has a narrow waist (an isthmus connecting two volcanos), 6 miles across.
This description still applies to Big Island (if we stretch it a bit):
> You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.
You can drive from the beach on the leeward side, going past dry ranchland with an average annual rainfall of ~10-15" (similar to arid West Texas places like Midland), to the Mauna Kea Observatory, where snow can sometimes be found, in under an hour and a half; and from there across to the windward side, back to the beach at Hilo, with about 10 feet of rain a year, in another hour and 15 minutes or so.
Truly wild and must be seen to be believed.
We did a tour to Mauna Kea and watched the sunset from above the cloud layer. It was spectacular.
And as you say, snow, whereas we'd been on the beach just a couple of hours before. Guide didn't drive straight up due to acclimatization and I still got slightly dizzy up there, it's over 4200m (13800 ft) up there after all.
While the Big Island is certainly much larger than the other Hawaiian islands, it's not huge. We did day trips covering about a third of the island, including multiple tourist-y stops. And yea the nature there kept surprising us again and again.
Also the tallest mountain on Earth!
For those downvoting: As measured from the planetary surface(=sea floor in this case), as opposed to sea level
I've always thought that it seems like a silly way to measure it.. Everest also goes to the sea floor, technically.
Everything is silly, and consensus reality on these kind of things is just a glorified Reddit thread IRL. There's at least four plausible metrics. Everest is tallest from the local mean sea level (the smoothed gravitational equipotential—what a stationary water surface hugs); McKinley-Denali from its local terrain base; Mauna Kea from the local terrain base inclusive of underwater terrain; and Chimborazo, in equatorial Ecuador (it's Ecuador because it's equatorial), as measured from this planet's center-of-mass (the planet bulges out approaching the equator because of its spinning—"oblateness").
Like a Reddit thread, it's best not to argue too much with what the hive-mind decides. People literally died climbing what they believed to be the correct answer. Let them have their thing. :)
Following up on your pedantism: Chimborazo isn't in Ecuador because it's equatorial, but rather, it's equatorial because it's in Ecuador.
(Or, perhaps, because it lies near or on the equator.)
There are non-Ecuadorian equatorial locations.
:-)
(I do like, appreciate, and was previously aware of the various claims to "highest mountain". Interesting also to contemplate that the early Rockies, and perhaps Appalachian mountains (themselves older than dirt, literally), may once have exceeded thirty thousand feet (approaching 10,000 m). Though the Rockies figure might be an ambitious reading of the Teton Fault having experienced 20,000 -- 30,000 feet of vertical displacement. This is possible without peaks reaching such heights, given erosion. Estimates of the original height of the Appalachians is even more tenuous and indirect.)
Enjoyed your clear description but I don't know that framing it as some kind of hive mind group think issue is that accurate. It's just taxonomy and ontology, it's ok to have different taxonomies for different contexts. The same issue exists for everything. planets, temperature, oceans, species..
What is being called hive mind, that used to be called cargo cult, is a real thing on HN, though.
There’s this fantasy that there are a bunch of geniuses that can adequately cover any topic here and that discussion will be inclusive and enlightening, but, no, it’s just a frustrating cauldron of wannabes and bad info that periodically hit upon things.
Hive mind, cargo cult, and a third phenomena, groupthink, are somewhat related but probably more usefully considered as distinct.
A hive mind in its original form is a form of emergent intelligence most especially associated with social insects (e.g., ants, bees, and termites), where collective behavioural patterns emerge which are independent of, and not fully explained by, any individual behaviours or intelligence. The term is of course also applied to humans, perhaps most famously as "the madness of crowds", as popularised by the book of the same title.
Groupthink, to skip over cargo cults for a moment, is a case where individual beliefs and/or behaviours are influenced by a group, often as an otherwise poorly-substantiated set of beliefs or actions, usually in agreement with some leader. Why groupthink emerges and what possible social/psychological evolutionary advantages it might convey (compensating for the cost of beliefs at odds with reality and empirical evidence) are hotly debated. Unlike the hive mind, groupthink isn't emergent, in the sense that individuals express specific beliefs or exhibit specific behaviours, though generally associated with the group context.
Cargo-cults are a form of groupthink. My own view is that cargo cults emerge in response to highly complex phenomena, either entirely beyond the grasp of individuals, or pushing the limits of scientific or technical knowledge. The original form, emerging on Pacific islands during and following WWII were a case of a non-technological culture (the native island inhabitants) trying to attain the benefits of a technological society (the various military belligerants of WWII) by emulating airstrips and the hope of the cargo (goods and services) these apparently brought the advanced society. Air-borne transport is knowable by humans, but only in a given social-technological context, which the islanders lacked.
In other instances, cargo culting tends to resemble fads and fashions where indicia or characteristics of some complex concept are adhered to, sometimes to achieve their ends, sometimes to indicate adherence to or alignment with a group. Fashion, language, dress, management trends, and software development practices (3GL, structured code, Agile, ML, and the like may all be examples in at least some cases). Often the foundations are more than purely technical, e.g., management or investors may feel a need to follow the crowd / leaders, often to avoid scapegoating or accountability in the event of failure.
All of which of course is distinct from the false-competence delusion of an expert within one domain presuming expertise in others, e.g., Nobel Disease <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>.
Humans measuring stuff and getting pedantic is a sport for the ages.
So I’m not supposed to measure it from my belly button? ..,
But really, is there a “highest point on earth”? That takes into account all the variations of land. Would it work if earth isn’t a perfect sphere?
Shout out to Chimborazo, where the summit is (likely) furthest from the center of the Earth. (I understand Huascarán is in contention, and don't know the latest details.)
Then you’d be calling a whole continent a single mountain and it wouldn’t be a continuous slope in one direction.
I agree though that it’s a bit silly to measure Mauna Kea to the ocean floor.
It feels like it makes a bit more sense with Mauna Kea, since Big Island is just five shield volcanoes in a trenchcoat, and the point where the land meets the ocean is basically just the foothills of the mountains. You cannot say that of Everest, which is over 400 miles from the nearest ocean.
How does the rain avoid the desert areas?
It's a "rain shadow"[0]
The predominant wind is from the east, and the air cools aid forms rainclouds as it tries to rise over the mountains in the center of the island. Then warms again as it descends down the eastern slopes.
So the eastern (Hilo) side is pretty lush jungle, and the west(Kona) is desert.
With snowy mountains in between.
It's interesting to see the transition. Lush green grass and vegetation on your left, and as you turn your head right, it goes more yellow and then completely dry desert on your right.
It's almost like you can see the line across the terrain.
YT link is live video.
USGS info: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea
Timeline: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/volcano-updates/volca...
Money shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24GcMK020Ao
Three weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db9qvUWYgcQ
I happened to be on island and got to see it from 5-7am, it was truly a sight to behold, unlike anything else I've seen. Got some cool pictures but of course they really can't do it justice.
Even a mile away we felt some heat! Astounding amount of energy literally spewing from Earths core
Plume over 20k ft??
Uhh what the heck is a plume anyway?
Ash and gas: the "smoke"
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This has been happening for a while now on a fairly regular schedule. Geology hub covered a previous eruptive episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkMz4b5Ogd8
Can’t predict the volcano, but I highly recommend a helicopter trip over Kilauea if you have a chance to go. Even if it is not currently erupting, from the air you can see the cooled lava flow paths and it’s clear the massive volume that occasionally flows out.
Normally you are correct, though for the current series of eruptions this year they can often be predicted within a a day or two of accuracy by looking at the micro radians pressure. Once it gets past 12.5, Madame Pēlē is going to start the fountain in short order.
We kept the Kilauea YT stream going 24/7 and just waited till it started and then drove over.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iws3rh5vLAQ
Kilauea has been erupting every week or two since Christmas Eve and fountaining every week or two for two months now.
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The only way I will ride in a chopper is if myself or an immediate family member is being flown to a hospital.
[flagged]
Multiple sources indicate that helicopters have a higher fatal accident rate compared to cars, with some calculations showing helicopters to be 10 to 85 times more dangerous when comparing based on hours flown.
I don’t care if the probability of failure is lower in a helicopter than automobile. The failure modes for helicopters are all worse than that of an automobile. Chances of dying if something goes wrong is much higher.
Uh, the aircraft safety figure you're probably thinking of only applies to fixed-wing, airline aircraft -- GA, private flights, and helis are more dangerous.
[flagged]
Sorry for the tangent, but now I'm curious: can you get a paper cut from toilet paper? It doesn't seem to have the same kind of edges.
Probably not. Its just takibg the thread to its most absurd conclusion because the whole thing is absurd.
A rule that has emerged over the years is that if there's some volcano erupting spectacularly, if I book a flight and go fly there, it will immediately stop. So if anyone would like the lava to cease, just send me a plane ticket...
Tom Scott is that you?
The VOG lately on Oahu has been really bad, desperately hoping we keep tradewinds around. A few weeks ago we had Kona winds and it was nauseating.
Live link is useless link. Nothing to see except steam.
timestamp for "lava more than 1k feet high" please.
https://youtu.be/24GcMK020Ao
thanks. So that would be from 2025-06-20 01:54:00 HST (Hawaii Standard Time) and onwards.
Big Island is an extremely interesting place. Its just few kilometers wide but it has around 8 climate zones ranging from snow, desert, volcano, tropical, beaches, rainforest what not. You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.
There is one public bus that goes around and once I was the only passenger and the driver stopped the bus near the ocean to show the travelling whales/dolphins.
You must be thinking of a different island. Hawaii, the Big Island is big. 93 miles long, 76 miles wide. Maui has a narrow waist (an isthmus connecting two volcanos), 6 miles across.
This description still applies to Big Island (if we stretch it a bit):
> You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.
You can drive from the beach on the leeward side, going past dry ranchland with an average annual rainfall of ~10-15" (similar to arid West Texas places like Midland), to the Mauna Kea Observatory, where snow can sometimes be found, in under an hour and a half; and from there across to the windward side, back to the beach at Hilo, with about 10 feet of rain a year, in another hour and 15 minutes or so.
Truly wild and must be seen to be believed.
We did a tour to Mauna Kea and watched the sunset from above the cloud layer. It was spectacular.
And as you say, snow, whereas we'd been on the beach just a couple of hours before. Guide didn't drive straight up due to acclimatization and I still got slightly dizzy up there, it's over 4200m (13800 ft) up there after all.
While the Big Island is certainly much larger than the other Hawaiian islands, it's not huge. We did day trips covering about a third of the island, including multiple tourist-y stops. And yea the nature there kept surprising us again and again.
Also the tallest mountain on Earth!
For those downvoting: As measured from the planetary surface(=sea floor in this case), as opposed to sea level
I've always thought that it seems like a silly way to measure it.. Everest also goes to the sea floor, technically.
Everything is silly, and consensus reality on these kind of things is just a glorified Reddit thread IRL. There's at least four plausible metrics. Everest is tallest from the local mean sea level (the smoothed gravitational equipotential—what a stationary water surface hugs); McKinley-Denali from its local terrain base; Mauna Kea from the local terrain base inclusive of underwater terrain; and Chimborazo, in equatorial Ecuador (it's Ecuador because it's equatorial), as measured from this planet's center-of-mass (the planet bulges out approaching the equator because of its spinning—"oblateness").
Like a Reddit thread, it's best not to argue too much with what the hive-mind decides. People literally died climbing what they believed to be the correct answer. Let them have their thing. :)
Following up on your pedantism: Chimborazo isn't in Ecuador because it's equatorial, but rather, it's equatorial because it's in Ecuador.
(Or, perhaps, because it lies near or on the equator.)
There are non-Ecuadorian equatorial locations.
:-)
(I do like, appreciate, and was previously aware of the various claims to "highest mountain". Interesting also to contemplate that the early Rockies, and perhaps Appalachian mountains (themselves older than dirt, literally), may once have exceeded thirty thousand feet (approaching 10,000 m). Though the Rockies figure might be an ambitious reading of the Teton Fault having experienced 20,000 -- 30,000 feet of vertical displacement. This is possible without peaks reaching such heights, given erosion. Estimates of the original height of the Appalachians is even more tenuous and indirect.)
Enjoyed your clear description but I don't know that framing it as some kind of hive mind group think issue is that accurate. It's just taxonomy and ontology, it's ok to have different taxonomies for different contexts. The same issue exists for everything. planets, temperature, oceans, species..
What is being called hive mind, that used to be called cargo cult, is a real thing on HN, though.
There’s this fantasy that there are a bunch of geniuses that can adequately cover any topic here and that discussion will be inclusive and enlightening, but, no, it’s just a frustrating cauldron of wannabes and bad info that periodically hit upon things.
Hive mind, cargo cult, and a third phenomena, groupthink, are somewhat related but probably more usefully considered as distinct.
A hive mind in its original form is a form of emergent intelligence most especially associated with social insects (e.g., ants, bees, and termites), where collective behavioural patterns emerge which are independent of, and not fully explained by, any individual behaviours or intelligence. The term is of course also applied to humans, perhaps most famously as "the madness of crowds", as popularised by the book of the same title.
Groupthink, to skip over cargo cults for a moment, is a case where individual beliefs and/or behaviours are influenced by a group, often as an otherwise poorly-substantiated set of beliefs or actions, usually in agreement with some leader. Why groupthink emerges and what possible social/psychological evolutionary advantages it might convey (compensating for the cost of beliefs at odds with reality and empirical evidence) are hotly debated. Unlike the hive mind, groupthink isn't emergent, in the sense that individuals express specific beliefs or exhibit specific behaviours, though generally associated with the group context.
Cargo-cults are a form of groupthink. My own view is that cargo cults emerge in response to highly complex phenomena, either entirely beyond the grasp of individuals, or pushing the limits of scientific or technical knowledge. The original form, emerging on Pacific islands during and following WWII were a case of a non-technological culture (the native island inhabitants) trying to attain the benefits of a technological society (the various military belligerants of WWII) by emulating airstrips and the hope of the cargo (goods and services) these apparently brought the advanced society. Air-borne transport is knowable by humans, but only in a given social-technological context, which the islanders lacked.
In other instances, cargo culting tends to resemble fads and fashions where indicia or characteristics of some complex concept are adhered to, sometimes to achieve their ends, sometimes to indicate adherence to or alignment with a group. Fashion, language, dress, management trends, and software development practices (3GL, structured code, Agile, ML, and the like may all be examples in at least some cases). Often the foundations are more than purely technical, e.g., management or investors may feel a need to follow the crowd / leaders, often to avoid scapegoating or accountability in the event of failure.
All of which of course is distinct from the false-competence delusion of an expert within one domain presuming expertise in others, e.g., Nobel Disease <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>.
Humans measuring stuff and getting pedantic is a sport for the ages.
So I’m not supposed to measure it from my belly button? ..,
But really, is there a “highest point on earth”? That takes into account all the variations of land. Would it work if earth isn’t a perfect sphere?
Shout out to Chimborazo, where the summit is (likely) furthest from the center of the Earth. (I understand Huascarán is in contention, and don't know the latest details.)
Then you’d be calling a whole continent a single mountain and it wouldn’t be a continuous slope in one direction.
I agree though that it’s a bit silly to measure Mauna Kea to the ocean floor.
It feels like it makes a bit more sense with Mauna Kea, since Big Island is just five shield volcanoes in a trenchcoat, and the point where the land meets the ocean is basically just the foothills of the mountains. You cannot say that of Everest, which is over 400 miles from the nearest ocean.
How does the rain avoid the desert areas?
It's a "rain shadow"[0]
The predominant wind is from the east, and the air cools aid forms rainclouds as it tries to rise over the mountains in the center of the island. Then warms again as it descends down the eastern slopes.
So the eastern (Hilo) side is pretty lush jungle, and the west(Kona) is desert. With snowy mountains in between.
[0]https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/rain-s...
It's interesting to see the transition. Lush green grass and vegetation on your left, and as you turn your head right, it goes more yellow and then completely dry desert on your right.
It's almost like you can see the line across the terrain.
Probably rain shadow due to the mountains
It checks the biome type like in Minecraft!
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