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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Lava-Walking
Tuesday. 7.21.09 8:53 pm
We were out on the lava early that day. Public lava-viewing always begins at 2 pm, so we had to vacate the lava fields by 1 pm so that the public wouldn't see us way out in the lava and get an idea to follow us there. It was bad enough that a bunch of Mars scientists (not us) were out there in the lava fields without proper equipment or a guide.

We had been lava-walkers for almost a week now, with at least 8 hours per day of lava-walking experience under our belts. We had walked on the razor-sharp, loosely-stacked shards of the clinkery a'a lavas, we had crunched our way over miles and miles of ropey paehoehoe, and we had learned to identify hidden lava tubes, waiting under fragile paehoehoe roofs to swallow us up. The key to walking on a'as was not to fall down. An angry a'a had snagged my field pants the day before, leaving an awkward square hole in my pants at shin level. For the clinkery a'as we all wore gloves while we were in the field to protect our hands. Nobody wants to get splinters made of glass.

The key to walking on paehoehoe was to stick to the stuff that was the most difficult to walk over. Lobes of frozen lava, piled high as if it came out of an out-of-control toothpaste tube? This was your ticket to safety. A smooth, flat area that looked like a man-made path? These were most likely to be the roofs of lava tubes.

The lava that we had been walking over all week was all at least 25 years old. Today's lava was crisper and crunchier. Much of it was still bright silver, the color lava has before there is a darkening of its silica coating. I stepped on an especially bright silver lobe of lava. "How old is this one?" I asked Scott. "That's 2008 lava," he said, "that came out about a week ago." The lava was spilling down from Kiluaea's currently active vent, Pu'u o'o. We couldn't see the vent from here, just a hazy cloud of gas in the distance and the big black swaths of lava carved in the forests on the sides of the volcano like ski runs in the summer. The new lava was coming over the pali and then disappearing beneath the surface and running in lava tubes until it reached the sea. A large bench had formed where the lava was protruding out across the surface of the water forming a large, brittle plate over the ocean. Where one of the lava tubes reached the sea the lava-water interaction had caused large explosions had created a small spatter cone. Even now it a giant column of gas was roaring from the phreatmagmatic cone and bursts of ash and volcanic bombs were being hurled from the explosions.

We wound our way carefully through the fantastical landscape of petrified lava in various shades of silver and black. We stopped to see a sign that had been engulfed in lava with all of its warnings melted off. We were searching for the holy-grail of lava-walkers: actively flowing lava. Scott had warned us that we might not be able to find it. Even if we could, it might be too dangerous to approach. The lava-fields changed daily, and many times lava-spotting could be pure luck. But we had more than luck, we had Scott, who not only knew the lava forecast for the day (reported by helicopters circling overhead) but who in our eyes knew everything there was to know about volcanoes, plants, animals, and Hawaii. Scott could not only name every Hawaiian plant we asked him about, he could also tell you what it was used for, whether or not it was native, and if it wasn't, when it had come to the islands and from where. He knew the Hawaiian language and all of the old Polynesian legends. He was one of those people who knew a hundred times more than you did, but took his only joy in sharing his knowledge with others and never in lording it over them. Scott's watchful eyes scanned back and forth across the lava field, to each of us, and, warily, towards the Mars scientists.
We had overtaken them about a half an hour ago. As it happened, many of them were familiar to us, and there had been a great many exclamations and joyful embraces as there can only be when one Mars scientist is reunited with another Mars scientist in full view of an erupting volcano. They had admitted to us that they were not experienced in lava-walking or lava-location, so they were thinking about heading back. When they saw that Scott was leading us purposefully, they had lingered, eventually starting to follow us across the lava. Scott was wary; it was enough that he was responsible for all ~12 of our lives on the lava field, he couldn't afford the responsibility of another 50 inexperienced Mars scientists. At last Scott called from up ahead for us to approach carefully. He had found a skylight, a hole in the top of a lava tube that allowed you to peer down inside at the rapidly flowing lava. Everyone was standing on the smooth, pathlike lava nearby... until they caught a glimpse of the lava and realized that it was flowing directly beneath them. Nearby cracks in the lava surface were giving off tremendous amounts of heat, so we decided to break for lunch and toast our frozen burritos that we had wrapped in tin foil and brought along for just such an occasion. We pushed our burritos gently into the hot cracks, just far enough to get a good baking, not far enough to fall through.

We had brought our lava-sampling gear, but the lava was too low for us to reach it without endangering ourselves. Even so, we couldn't come within three feet of the skylight opening because of the blazing heat coming from the flowing lava. Some of my colleagues made a game of throwing balls of tin foil and banana peels into the skylight. They would remain for just a moment carried along suspended on the lava's surface, then they would slowly sink and disappear. It felt like littering to me, notwithstanding the fact that the tin foil was completely obliterated within moments of falling into the hole. I wondered if some geologist in the future would collect a sample only to find it anomalously enriched in aluminum. For my part, I tossed several rocks into the skylight to watch them pause and sink as the stream carried them swiftly towards the sea.

Soon enough, the Mars scientists had arrived, having followed us to their own peril through the lava fields. They gathered in a large group and stood peering into the lava tube while standing on its roof until Scott ushered them to safer ground and bade them look through the skylight in groups of less than five at a time.

After the skylight we took off at a quick pace and shook off the Mars scientists. Scott had one more destination and we couldn't afford to let them follow us there. We were going to the site of the explosions, the large, churning smokestack at the water's edge. Scott looked at us seriously. He trusted us to avoid places where gas seeped through the cracks in the surface. He advised us to stay away from places where the rocks were orange and glowing. And most important of all, he told us that if the wind changes direction and the volcano's toxic plume came towards us, we were to put our shirts over our faces and run like hell.

Close to the water's edge all of the lava was bright silver 2008 lava. We could hear the roaring of the gas jet from the explosion crater and the pitter-patter of rock shards and volcanic bombs being lofted in the air and spattering onto the ground. The gas came out, never ending, mostly white but occasionally churning brown with a new batch of ash to spit onto the bench. I could have stayed for hours, watching the mesmerizing swirling of the vent, hearing the sounds of the rocks as they made steaming parabolic paths away from the column. But Scott had a bad feeling and it was time to go. Wherever Scott was, I was with Scott. Our other leaders, Bruce and Sarah, were slow to leave the beautiful volcano by the sea and some of the other students were lingering back there with them.
Scott was on the radio. "Bruce, Sarah, get the hell out of there." We were too far away from them now to shout, but they didn't seem to be moving with any urgency. There was urgency in Scott's voice. "Come on guys, get out of there," he said into the radio. There was no reply.
Then it happened. A huge roar came up from the water's edge, the sound of splitting and cracking and hissing mixed with a giant splash as the edge of the bench failed and went crashing into the sea. The mixture of the new lava and the water made an explosion that rippled down the edge all the way to the vent. Now they were running. Old and young, leaders and students, they were all running as fast as their legs could carry them across the impossible lava-jungle and away from the explosions.

Two days later, the entire bench collapsed into the sea.







1 Comments.


Join the club man.

Wow lava exploring? That's pretty badass.

» dont-see on 2009-07-22 09:08:32

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