USGS info: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea
Timeline: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/volcano-updates/volca...
Three weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db9qvUWYgcQ
Even a mile away we felt some heat! Astounding amount of energy literally spewing from Earths core
Uhh what the heck is a plume anyway?
We kept the Kilauea YT stream going 24/7 and just waited till it started and then drove over.
There is one public bus that goes around and once I was the only passenger and the driver stopped the bus near the ocean to show the travelling whales/dolphins.
> You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.
You can drive from the beach on the leeward side, going past dry ranchland with an average annual rainfall of ~10-15" (similar to arid West Texas places like Midland), to the Mauna Kea Observatory, where snow can sometimes be found, in under an hour and a half; and from there across to the windward side, back to the beach at Hilo, with about 10 feet of rain a year, in another hour and 15 minutes or so.
Truly wild and must be seen to be believed.
The predominant wind is from the east, and the air cools aid forms rainclouds as it tries to rise over the mountains in the center of the island. Then warms again as it descends down the eastern slopes.
So the eastern (Hilo) side is pretty lush jungle, and the west(Kona) is desert. With snowy mountains in between.
[0]https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/rain-s...
And as you say, snow, whereas we'd been on the beach just a couple of hours before. Guide didn't drive straight up due to acclimatization and I still got slightly dizzy up there, it's over 4200m (13800 ft) up there after all.
While the Big Island is certainly much larger than the other Hawaiian islands, it's not huge. We did day trips covering about a third of the island, including multiple tourist-y stops. And yea the nature there kept surprising us again and again.
It's almost like you can see the line across the terrain.
Like a Reddit thread, it's best not to argue too much with what the hive-mind decides. People literally died climbing what they believed to be the correct answer. Let them have their thing. :)
(Or, perhaps, because it lies near or on the equator.)
There are non-Ecuadorian equatorial locations.
:-)
(I do like, appreciate, and was previously aware of the various claims to "highest mountain". Interesting also to contemplate that the early Rockies, and perhaps Appalachian mountains (themselves older than dirt, literally), may once have exceeded thirty thousand feet (approaching 10,000 m). Though the Rockies figure might be an ambitious reading of the Teton Fault having experienced 20,000 -- 30,000 feet of vertical displacement. This is possible without peaks reaching such heights, given erosion. Estimates of the original height of the Appalachians is even more tenuous and indirect.)
But really, is there a “highest point on earth”? That takes into account all the variations of land. Would it work if earth isn’t a perfect sphere?
I agree though that it’s a bit silly to measure Mauna Kea to the ocean floor.
There’s this fantasy that there are a bunch of geniuses that can adequately cover any topic here and that discussion will be inclusive and enlightening, but, no, it’s just a frustrating cauldron of wannabes and bad info that periodically hit upon things.
A hive mind in its original form is a form of emergent intelligence most especially associated with social insects (e.g., ants, bees, and termites), where collective behavioural patterns emerge which are independent of, and not fully explained by, any individual behaviours or intelligence. The term is of course also applied to humans, perhaps most famously as "the madness of crowds", as popularised by the book of the same title.
Groupthink, to skip over cargo cults for a moment, is a case where individual beliefs and/or behaviours are influenced by a group, often as an otherwise poorly-substantiated set of beliefs or actions, usually in agreement with some leader. Why groupthink emerges and what possible social/psychological evolutionary advantages it might convey (compensating for the cost of beliefs at odds with reality and empirical evidence) are hotly debated. Unlike the hive mind, groupthink isn't emergent, in the sense that individuals express specific beliefs or exhibit specific behaviours, though generally associated with the group context.
Cargo-cults are a form of groupthink. My own view is that cargo cults emerge in response to highly complex phenomena, either entirely beyond the grasp of individuals, or pushing the limits of scientific or technical knowledge. The original form, emerging on Pacific islands during and following WWII were a case of a non-technological culture (the native island inhabitants) trying to attain the benefits of a technological society (the various military belligerants of WWII) by emulating airstrips and the hope of the cargo (goods and services) these apparently brought the advanced society. Air-borne transport is knowable by humans, but only in a given social-technological context, which the islanders lacked.
In other instances, cargo culting tends to resemble fads and fashions where indicia or characteristics of some complex concept are adhered to, sometimes to achieve their ends, sometimes to indicate adherence to or alignment with a group. Fashion, language, dress, management trends, and software development practices (3GL, structured code, Agile, ML, and the like may all be examples in at least some cases). Often the foundations are more than purely technical, e.g., management or investors may feel a need to follow the crowd / leaders, often to avoid scapegoating or accountability in the event of failure.
All of which of course is distinct from the false-competence delusion of an expert within one domain presuming expertise in others, e.g., Nobel Disease <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>.