![]() Thomas Jaggar, who had founded the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory a mere four years earlier in 1912, attempted to forecast the next Mauna Loa eruption based on the pattern of rift zone eruptions on the volcano since 1868. The eruption began on May 19th, 1916, and was brief, lasting less than two weeks, but it offers lessons for future Mauna Loa eruptions.ĭr. Wood and courtesy of University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Hamilton Library. View is from within Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, with Kīlauea caldera wall visible in the middle of the photo. Image of the steam plume that accompanied the start of Mauna Loa’s 1916 eruption on the Southwest Rift Zone. The eruption of 1868 still stands as one of the deadliest disasters in the modern history of Hawaiʻi.Sources/Usage: Public Domain. However, the fatalities could have been much worse, were the island as populated as it is today. In total 77 Hawaiians lost their lives due to the tsunami and landslides spurred by the eruption. Queen Emma appealed to citizens of the islands to donate to the relief. The party landed in Hilo on April 15th and toured the damage along the Puna and Kaʻū coastlines. Upon receiving news of the damage and destruction on April 9th, King Kamehameha V departed Oʻahu for Hawaiʻi Island to provide relief to the victims. One family was reportedly trapped for ten days after the violent flows created a kīpuka around their home. The flow lasted five days and destroyed 4,000 acres of grazing land on the Kahuku Ranch. The main lava flow was about a mile wide, with three smaller branches and managed to reach the ocean within four hours.Īerial image of 1868 Mauna Loa flow, seen here as the darkest black (USGS Photo, 1954) "And from the whole length of this orifice the lava rushed up with intense vehemence, spouting jets one hundered to two hundred feet high burning the forest and spreading out a mile wide" Fountains of lava by some accounts were 500 to 1,000 feet (150 to 300m) high near the residence of Captain Robert Brown. On the evening of April 7th, five days after the 7.9-magnitude earthquake, lava burst forth from a fissure on the Kahuku Ranch, about ten miles inland from the coast. Villages at ʻĀpua Point and Keauhou, now within Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, were decimated. One wave was estimated to be more than 20 feet (6 m) high in Ka‘ū. A massive tsunami hit large swaths of the coastline with at least eight waves over a period of several hours. The tremors were so intense that they also spurred a small eruption in Kīlauea Iki crater and reportedly caused cracks at the summit of Kīlauea.įurther destruction soon came from the sea. The USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory estimates that the entire island south and east of Mauna Loa's summit and rift zones moved seaward and subsided several meters during the earthquake. ".the falling of walls and chimneys, the swaying of trees, the trembling of shrubs, the fright of men and animals, made throughout the southern half of Hawaii such scenes of terror as had never been witnessed before," the Reverend Titus Coan wrote. The quake unleashed river of mud about a half-mile wide and twenty feet deep in Wood Valley, burying ten homes and killing thirty one people as well hundreds of livestock at William Reed's Kapāpala Ranch. Landslides occurred as far north as Waipio. At Waiʻōhinu, a large stone church reportedly collapsed just seconds after the shaking began. Wei) "Such a convulsion has no parallel in the memory, the history, or the traditions of the Hawaiian Islands."ĭamage was immediate and it was extensive. Ahu mark the trail through the 1868 lava flow in Kahuku (NPS Photo/J.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |