Volcanoclast hosts this month’s Accretionary Wedge on countertop geology.

Have you seen a great countertop out there?  Sure, everyone says it’s “granite”, but you know better.  Take a picture, post it on your own blog or send it to me and I’ll post it for you.  Do you think you know what it is or how it was formed?

I was all set to write about the rapakivi granite (that’s “Baltic brown” to you realtors out there, who refer to everything as granite or marble) in my kitchen when, hark, from the sky down came a reminder of a really cool countertop of yesteryear. Black marble with deformed fossils. Or more precisely, a lightly-toasted, black, fossiliferous, Irish limestone in the shape of a large octagon that belongs to U2.

Black "marble" of Kilkenny

Some science channel or the other provides constant background noise in my house (with signal being occasional exclamations such as “That in NO WAY could have caused the K-T extinction,” “When will these TV earthquake scientists balls up and start talking about strain instead of stress?”, “That 3D dinosaur has more feathers than our last Thanksgiving turkey” and “Really, did that American geologist just say MOGMA?!” There’s also the gratuitous repetition of “bass-solt” after a Britisher says the word “basalt.” Nope, never really left fifth grade.) For the last few days, a Science channel commercial on heavy rotation has been the trailer for U2′s new documentary From The Sky Down. The U2 fans are going to be on me like a pack of rabid … U2 fans for this, but one can only take so much Bono cooing about the transition from playing notes to finding The Great Pumpkin or something while creating Achtung Baby. It’s like those who say they found god in geology or New Orleans; a lot of times life simply boils down to being really good at something and enjoying doing it. For the good times and cash money.

The roof over the bar (photo by bobsrocket on Flickr CC-BY-NC-SA)

Anyway, Accretionary Wedge. Countertops. U2 commercial. Of course! The Kilkenny marble countertop of Dublin’s Octagon Bar in the Clarence Hotel owned by Bono and The Edge. I’ve been in there twice, but it wasn’t until the second time, when the place was a lot less crowded, that I nodded off looked down, noticed the fossils, especially the sheared brachiopod (see above – bottom right), and realized that I was looking at the beginning stages of a marble with preserved fossil fragments. The bartender is usually asked when Bono’s coming in or if she’s waited on The Edge so was really surprised when she caught me scrutinizing the bar and asking her if she knew its source. That it’s Irish is all she knew which sealed it – Lower Carboniferous “marble” from County Kilkenny in the southeast of Ireland. Not to be confused with a Kilkenny stout, which I am pretty sure can be had at the Octagon Bar while listening to The Joshua Tree, which in my opinion was the best U2 album ever.

Is there anything you cannot do, Ireland?

Further reading: Kilkenny Geology

To mark the passing of Christopher Hitchens, today’s rock is the Hadean Acasta gneiss on display in the Smithsonian Museum. Give hell hell, Hitch!

It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? A trifecta of geology. Basalt, fossil coral and iron staining of the fossil. Snorkeling off the Kona coast, D and I saw thousands upon thousands of live Milleporidae (fire coral) and Faviidae (brain coral) growing on basalt boulders washed out to sea. Often, I’d come up to clean my mask, put it back on and then half-submerge it to visually straddle two worlds – Planet Of The Apes above and The Life Aquatic below the water line of the Hawaiian islands. Next time, I will have a waterproof camera on me.

I found this piece of that underwater world on a Kona beach and decided to keep it. John G asked if I knew what I was doing; did I really want to incur the wrath of Pele by taking a piece of her off the Big Island? When I brought the rock back to Waikiki, John’s assistant freaked out as well and said I was welcome to mail it back to her if my luck started to sour. Some of you may have heard of the belief that taking rocks off the Hawaiian islands results in bad luck. It’s big on the islands, having taken deep root even in otherwise rational people. Scientists don’t believe in any of that pish-posh hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo, or at least we ought not to. And, moreover, I’m a geologist, one who understands and appreciates Pele and her rocks, and didn’t take it from a national park, so I get a pass.

Then why the sinking feeling inside each time I consider this sample? And that dream! If you break it apart logically, I was involved in a really scary car wreck almost exactly four years ago to the day, D and I are driving up to Wisconsin for Christmas, we are going to be forced to make a hard decision soon and, for Pete’s Pele’s sake, I have bags of Hawaiian beach sand that didn’t bother the Hawaiians and don’t don chains of Christmas past and future and haunt me like this damned rock. Pele is possessive of her rocks, but not their constituent minerals? What kind of dumbass logic is that? And yet, almost every single day since we have returned from Hawaii, something has gone south to the point that yesterday afternoon, I had to sit down and declare to the universe, “OH COME ON.”

To top it all off, the thing is in the shape of an eye. Just staring at me. Like from on top of Mordor. With Sauron, laughing at me as I recount my dream of cow murder. “You killed Milky. Milky, nooooooo! Hahahaha*snort*hahaa!” (Actually, that’s what D says to me each time I bring it up.)

Respect Pele and send it back? Or put on my big girl socks and keep it? Let me know.

(I’m probably going to mail it back to John as an experiment. If things continue to flounder after I’ve repatriated the offender, then it’s just me and life being, you know, life.)

Found this chunk of aa (rubbly basalt) in the roof of a collapsed lava tube right next door to where we stayed on the Big Island of Hawaii. What are the growths/precipitates on the aa surface? They look like tiny little mushrooms but are actually crystalline. American nickel for scale.

Until your husband comes along and says, “Oh geez, are you crying?!”

Our day started on the southern flanks of Mauna Loa with a drive from Oceanview to Southpoint or Ka Lae, the southermost point in the 50 United States, situated at 18.91°N 155.68°W. Well below the Tropic of Cancer, but a stark reminder that it’s been a long time since I’ve been in the southern latitudes which needs correcting soon.

We then drove past many large windmills, Hawaiian grass-fed beef cattle and zebras (don’t ask) towards Hilo. After puttering around the town of Volcano (and noticing the Google Streetview car parked at a pub there) we made our way over to the national park. The rest of this post describes the stops we made on Kilauea along with pictures, some pithy remarks and tips should you choose to visit there some time.

The entrance to Volcanoes National Park sits right between Mauna Loa and Kilauea [MAP]. At Kilauea, the park is designed to contain the main summit caldera in which sits the Halema’uma’u crater (seen above) and Puʻu ʻŌʻō (or, more simply, Puu Oo), a cinder cone in the eastern rift zone of Kilauea. Puu Oo has been erupting and jettisoning lava into the sea continuously since the beginning of 1983. You can look at that either as 4/5th of the time I’ve been alive or as 7/1000000000th the age of the earth. A sense of temporal scale is handy in situations like this.

Active geology means active road construction and maintenance (your tax dollars at awesome work) so getting from point to point often requires sitting in “traffic” and staring at … steam vents that pop up where they feel like it.

Or parking the car and hiking to your next point of interest. The first time we stopped was at some vents into which people were throwing coins as offerings to Pele or through that unexplainable human desire to throw coins into places we cannot reach. D and I walked over to another steam vent and discussed the expelled gases – water vapor, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide. I explained that they are released during magma depressurization as it rises towards the surface and that I could also smell methane and hydrochloric acid in the mix. This elicited a dirty look from a young lady in flouncy skirts whose prayer while facing the vent in question had been disrupted by me and my scientific mambling. I should have told her to thank me for keeping her face from peeling off in an hour or so.

On to the volcanoes themselves. We drove west on Crater Rim Drive from the visitor center to see the Halema’uma’u crater from two locations: first at where I had my aforementioned epiphany and second from behind the Jaggar Museum. I highly recommend the short hike from the first lookout point to the museum as you get better and better vantage points from which to see Mauna Loa and peer into the Halema’uma’u fuming vent, and to walk by the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory. Also, inside the museum you see artistic depictions of Goddess Pele, who makes her residence at Kilauea. I like this one in particular because it reminds me of myself and most women during the course of any given month. Don’t piss off Pele, man, or she will cut you.

Crater Rim Drive is closed beyond this point all the way to where it meets Chain Of Craters Road, which takes you down to the sea. There are signs along the side of the road that tell you to keep your windows rolled up and to close your AC vents to keep from breathing the mix of toxic gases. Ever so often, we’d roll down the windows to take pictures and D would say, “Do you smell that? Smells like masala!” In truth, he first said, “Smells like curry!” and I had to correct him that what the west refers to as curry is actually what we call masala. Anyway, toxic volcanic gases smell like masala. Great. Apparently Pele will cut you … and eat your heart with macadamia nuts and a nice plum wine.

Now, onto giant, gorgeous lava tube beneath giant, gorgeous fern forest! We drove back east on Crater Rim Drive past the Visitors Center to an overlook from which you can see Kīlauea Iki, a beautiful pit crater just to the east of the Kīlauea summit.

Check out the fractures on the rim, probably caused by deflation after eruption (Who has two thumbs and is not a volcanologist? Me. So, please feel free to clarify, theorize, etc. in the comments below.)

From there, D and I walked down to the Thurston Lava Tube. I have never seen taller and more lush fern forests in my entire life, truly a botanist’s paradise. This would be as good a time as any to note the abundance of microclimates on the Big Island of Hawaii and how geology, topography and climate affect the evolution of any given flora and fauna. Of course, it’s hard for me to tell what is native to Hawaii and what came over when people increasingly migrated over from the American mainland and other countries, but these are isolated islands and natural life is markedly different or becomes different here. Places like this help us see more readily that the study of geology is absolutely crucial to understanding evolution. That it doesn’t occur in a vacuum but as response to changing environmental conditions.

The lava tube itself was pretty cool. Hard to imagine a river of lava flowing through this tunnel. Also mindblowing are the joints in the floor and ceiling of the tube through which tree roots propagate downwards into the tunnel. Which reminded me that I am not a fan of enclosed spaces (“Stop breathing my air!”) and that lava tubes have a tendency to collapse. And we were back out into the open forest, with the green plants and the oxygen. The sweet, sweet oxygen. Note to self: Blog at some point about the wonderful undergraduate geomorphology field trip to a karst system where you and acute claustrophobia were first acquainted.

Another thing I love about Hawaii is that plants grow anywhere and everywhere here. On rocks, on sand, on wood, on houses, on top of other plants, on you if you stand still long enough.

From here, we hopped onto the Chain Of Craters road to the sea, with some fun stops along the way.

Tree branch reaches out from a 1970s eruption:
Pahoehoe, or ropy lava, or natural sculpture:
Pahoehoe on the left, aa on the right, with approximately 6-foot-tall husband for scale:
Chain Of Craters Road cuts across lava flows from the 1960s and 70s:
A sea of lava:
USGS elevation marker with elevation conveniently missing:
Where land meets sea:
From the summit of Kilauea to the sea is a 4000-foot drop across ~15 miles of switchbacks. We drove all the way to where the Chain Of Craters Road stops, a mile or so before the road is abruptly cut off by a series of flows that buried the road and the nearby Royal Gardens Subdivision back in 1987. From here, we hiked the rest of the way to the flow and tooled around on it.

Where The Sidewalk Ends, I Ain’t Kidding edition:
View from where the Royal Gardens subdivision began:
D running away from the lava flow OF DOOM:
GeoBadgers represent! Me standing on two adjacent pahoehoe flows:
The Hölei Sea Arch:
And then, just like that, it was sunset and when the park closes. Many who were spending the night to catch lava flow into the sea began their evening picnics while we made our way out of the park.

Now, I can cross off another thing I wanted to do before kicking the bucket. Here is the complete set of pictures from this amazing trip; feel free to use it as a teaching set as it contains pictures of outcrops with scale. Here is the latest NPS Volcanoes National Park trip planner, full of maps, pictures and good advice. Please visit the regularly-updated website for area closure and other warnings.

Volcanic smog makes for beautiful sunsets.

A float in the Krewe of Thoth parade - Mardi Gras 2008

Apropos of the reason for this Hindu festival: Questions Lit Up, in which Pratap Bhanu Mehta takes on the Delhi University ban on teaching A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana and chides the Indian left and right for hijacking the culture for political gain.

… The Right commits the mistake of assimilating all tradition to one single glob, undifferentiated, where nuances don’t matter. But equally, the so-called Left has created intellectual divisions and categories of understanding that bear no relation to the texts at hand.