Volcano Club

Volcano Club only offers one type of membership - and that's lifetime. To become a member send some volcanic themed work to the HQ (volcanoclubhq@gmail.com) and you might get a codename or some other cool shit.

Friday 31 August 2012

Volcano of the Week #25 - Kilauea

I haven't done any blogging in a long time, because of the Olympics and moving to another country and stuff but mainly the Olympics- it's more important as it only happens every four years, I move all the time. As I haven't seen anything volcanic recently that I can write about I thought I'd do a volcano of the week. Kilauea is probably the most obvious volcano that's never featured, probably because I have so much trouble spelling it which is because I'm never allowed to play Hawaiian Scrabble. The volcano is one of the five shield volcanoes that make up Hawaii's big island and is characterised by continuous, slow eruptions - this one has been going on since 1983.

Compared to the other Hawaiian volcanoes Kilauea is fairly young being between 300,000 and 600,000 years old, the oldest Hawaiian volcano Kohala is over 1 million. The Hawaiian hotspot differs from other volcanoes as most volcanoes are caused by a meeting of plates creating a ridge in which the pressure of magma creates the volcano. The Hawaiian hotspot is right in the middle of a tectonic plate and is an incredibly hot patch of magma that seeps through a gap in the plate, the volcanoes that form here do so underwater and grow from the slow eruptions and cooling of magma. The only quiet period the volcano has had in recent  times was from 1934 to 1952 when the volcano didn't erupt at all, the first recorded eruption was in 1820, since then the volcano loads with a massive output, a bit like Prince (sorry I'm listening to a Prince documentary so forgive me if I go astray, hahahahaha).



Kilauea is the thought to be the body of Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess not the Brazilian footballer although they are pretty similar. Pele the goddess was a bit of a bitch (I think the other one was quite nice), one legend is that there was a young couple Ohi'a and Lehua who were deeply in love and Ohi'a built them a home in the forest. One day Pele was walking nearby and saw Ohi'a and thought he looked pretty hot however Ohi'a rejected Pele's advances. Lehua brought out a meal to Ohi'a (I love the rigid gender roles in this story), Pele went really mental when she saw Lehua and Ohi'a together as they looked so happy. Pele returned to her goddess form and turned Ohi'a into an ugly tree, Lehua was so upset and begged Pele to either turn her into a tree or Ohi'a back into a man which Pele refused, however some other gods took pity on Lehua and turned her into a flower to go on the tree so they could be together forever. But Pele was probably right as the couple's love seemed to be based mainly on physical attractiveness so they probably would have got bored of each other and Ohi'a would spend all day at work while Lehua would be bored and stuck inside all the time - so at least they avoided all that. So basically Pele gets really angry which she expresses as lava output, this means she's been really angry since 1983, it was probably Thatcher's re-election and the introduction of the McNugget, who wouldn't be angry in that sort of world.