Chasing Lava: A Fun and Fascinating Memoir of Hawaiian Volcanology
If you’re looking for a light, breezy, but informative book about volcanoes from a genuine volcanologist, I’ve got it right here for you. Chasing Lava: A Geologist’s Adventures at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory by Wendell Duffield is a delightful memoir of his years working at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. There’s a wonderful sense of adventure infusing the whole book, and he gets us up close and personal with Madame Pele’s handiwork.
Newly-hatched USGS geologist Wendell, his wife Anne, and their pets were stationed on the Big Island from 1969-1972. He worked on Kilauea Volcano at a time when the theory of plate tectonics was still brand new, our instruments were still bulky and somewhat primative, and volcanoes were much less understood than they are now.
He travels back in time with us to 1912, and traces the origin of HVO. Wendell’s personal experience on Kilauea helps us better understand how difficult the early work on Kilauea was. If you’re in to gadgets, you’ll extra love this chapter, because it has plenty of details about rigging volcano monitoring equipment from scratch. And you’ll gain a new appreciation for the work Thomas Jagger and his team did. Our knowledge of how volcanoes work grew in leaps and bounds thanks to them.
Wendell takes us through HVO’s history all the way up to the present, showing the eruptions and innovations that have allowed us to understand the behavior and hazards of hotspot volcanoes like the Hawaiian Islands. There’s a lot of good detail, but it’s all perfectly friendly for non-experts.
Then we go back to 1969 and move to Hawaii with Wendell, Anne, and their young kitty Mingo. This is where personal life joins the science life. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it’s like to move to an island for a job with the USGS, you’ll have your curiosity satisfied here. It’s certainly an adventure! Especially since moving to HVO with a cat at that time was a nightmare of bureaucracy. Thank Mingo for blazing the trail!
Living on a volcano certainly isn’t boring. The Duffields’ house is on short stilts, which magnifies the shaking from Kilauea’s frequent earthquakes. They could even feel the harmonic tremor from the Mauna Ulu lava fountains. And when atmospheric conditions were right, they could see the glow of lava on the clouds. It might not have been relaxing, but at least it was cool!
Personal life and scientific endeavours intermingle delightfully throughout the book. You’ll learn about Hawaii’s geological history, and its human history. Field work on the volcano could be solo, done with colleagues, or a beautiful day out with wife and new pupper. We get an intimate glimpse of island life, and a thorough look at Pele’s firey handiwork.
While Wendell was there, Kilauea put on a nearly continuous show, and he provides us a front row seat to it. We meet the geologists working hard in sometimes perilous conditions to understand how active volcanoes work, and mitigate their hazards. We learn how the island’s volcanoes function, and how they affect everything from the weather to groundwater. We get to see eruptions in action, and the USGS’s response to them.
Wendell recounts pulse-pounding moments that inevitably arise, like feeling solid lava wobble on a trail and realizing you’re actually standing on a thin crust above molten rock. He’s seen steam and methane explosions when lava buries vegetation, and recounts how people barbecue hot dogs from the charcoal left in tree molds in lava flows. And he describes how a colleague demonstrated that you can step into molten lava but keep your leg as long as you have colleagues there to pull you out! Somewhere on Kilauea, there is a leg mold, which may delight the geologists who rediscover it in the future.
He’s also survived deadly concentrations of volcanic gasses, which sometimes invisibly concentrate along low areas of the trails volcanologists use around the volcano. And he describes the day a temporary change in vent shape caused their normally safe viewpoint to be showered in cinders and molten blobs by a lava fountain. Being a geologist on an active volcano is often exciting and really, really dangerous!
Another danger was ordinance, some unexploded, left over from WWII. But most of it was safe, and Wendell describes how artillery shell casings and other bits were repurposed for use as scientific instruments. When no company is manufacturing the specialized instruments you need, you make do.
Wendell describes many scientific adventures: trying to influence the behavior of an eruption, studying plate tectonics in the dance of crust on a lava lake, mapping of extensive fault systems, and many other investigations.
Fans of Mount St. Helens will be delighted by the conclusion of the book, where Wendell ties the HVO’s work into the response to the 1980 eruptions.
I can’t recommend this book strongly enough. It’s a thorougly enjoyable, remarkably informative read, and while experts will appreciate it, amateurs will find it practically painless. Anyone from precocious preteens to lively centenarians should love it.
Chasing Lava: A Geologist’s Adventures at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory by Wendell Duffield
This is an easy choice for your next volcano read.
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[…] enjoyed Wendell A. Duffield’s Chasing Lava immensely, I was beyond delighted to discover that Wendell had written a book for younger people. I […]