The Super Hero gets the heebie-geebies

At this writing, I have my hands full. Wilson has turned into a Nervous Nelly and is having second thoughts about coming along when I hike the crest of Haleakala, the volcano that rose from the Pacific to become the beautiful island of Maui.It's time for a geology lesson.

30,000-foot volcano
If it was about heights, I could possibly understand the fear. The mountain rises 10,023 feet above the sea. But it's bigger than that. It actually rises 30,000 feet above the ocean floor. It is the largest dormant volcano in the world. It is so big that it actually bends down the earth's crust at the rate of about 0.12 inches a year.

From Kehei, it's hard to appreciate that Haleakala, in background, rises 10,000 feet above sea level.

 But that's not why Wilson is anxious. It's the fire thing.

OK, I got it: Wilson's a super hero who can make an estimated 30 children happy just by being there. Wilson can be stabbed with a knife, punctured by a lion and run over by a Mack truck and just keep bouncing.

But every super hero has a weakness. For Bruce Willis in the movie, Unbreakable, it was water. With Superman, it's kryptonite. And with Wilson, it's fire. And volcanoes are created by fire. It ain't the size of Haleakala that worries Wilson. It's all that fire.

Anyway, it's up to me to explain to Wilson why this isn't a problem, and why Haleakala isn't going to turn into some great big Mount St. Helens. And the answer is--SIAL.

The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble...
SIAL is geologic speak for silica and aluminum. two of the earth's lighter, and very abundant, elements. Silica is brittle, translucent and non-conducting. You can use it for electrical insulation. You can turn it into glass. Aluminum is malleable, opaque and a conductor of electricity. The two are almost identical, despite their obvious differences on the grand scale. There's a real surprise waiting for you on the atomic scale: The real difference between aluminum and silica that creates the big difference which we experience is actually very, very tiny--one electron and one proton. Wow.

Aluminum, far left, and silica, center, are very light and almost identical in structure. (Black circles are electrons. P=Proton. N=Neutron. Note that Iron has about twice as many protons, electrons and neutrons.

I'm reminded of a song: What a difference a proton makes....la, la, la...

Silica and aluminum are the pond scum of the earth. They are light, and they float to the top of the world.  If you live in Kansas, or Seattle, or Texas, or Paris, or Italy, you walk on silica and aluminum--which, by  the way,  are the primary components of clay, too. Truly, continental mountains are only made of clay (but our love is here to stay). Wear them down to their tiniest particles and you end up with the gooey substance that  you can mold into shapes and then fire to produce bowls and flower pots and beer mugs and cool things like that. A lot of the first written symbols were scratched into clay shards, helping to accelerate the advance of civilization.

Anyway, the fact that the continents have so much silica in them is the reason that continental volcanoes blow up while Hawaiian volcanoes sputter, boil and flow, but  otherwise don't cause a lot of trouble--uh, by comparison, anyway.

Hawaiian volcanoes are only about half silica and have a whole lot of iron in them. Their magma flows when it's hot and gets dark when it cool. When continental rocks melt from volcanism, roughly 75 percent of their magma is silica. Silica doesn't flow. It's really thick, even when hot. It's like tar.
 You can see what it's like when you watch someone blowing glass. Just imagine that sticky, viscous hot liquid trapped under pressure and imagine the pressure suddenly being released. Blowie, you have stuff flying everywhere. Just like ol' Mount St. Helens.

So anyway, Hawaii's volcanoes are rich in iron, and they don't build up a big head of steam and then let fly, like St. Helens did.

The Red Dirt Shirt
By the way, all that iron helps explain why tourists to Hawaii can purchase the Red Dirt Shirt. The soil on one of the oldest islands, Kauai, is particularly weathered and rusty red, and T-shirt companies make a killing making a muddy mess out of the local earth, and then indelibly staining shirts in the dirty red water. Then tourists pay them for the stained shirts and take a little bit of Hawaii home with them.

I put Wilson in my own Red Dirt Shirt for a few moments as it was drying with the rest of the laundry. That's Wilson, below, peeking out through the neck hole.

Wilson tries on the Red Dirt Shirt. Hawaii's iron-rich islands have eroded over millennia, and the iron in the rock that makes for "friendlier" volcanoes also creates a rusty-red soil which can be used to die T-shirts.

OK. So Wilson doesn't have to worry too much about an eruption. But that doesn't make climbing Haleakala any easier. Haleakala is a "shield" volcano. That means it looks like a shield that was laid on the ground. (You saw that in the photo at the top of this dispatch.) It rises very slowly. It won't be like climbing Mount Adams or Rainier, or any of the cascade volcanoes. It takes an awfully long walk to get to the top. So I ain't doing that.

What I'm looking at is driving Wilson up to the national park headquarters and then hiking from there to the summit. The summit is several thousand feet higher than where I am right now, so it's going to be a lot cooler. (Figure 4-5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler on a clear day for every thousand feet of elevation gained.)

Or maybe we'll drive to the summit and then go on one of those really long hikes at elevation.
I'm still figuring this out. But at least by explaining this, I've kind of calmed Wilson down a bit.
There will be more to share later.

Love,

Robert,
and Wilson.

A government map giving a three-dimentional view of Maui. Haleakala accounts for the big section of the island.