NATURAL FIERY WONDERS - The Sun and Hawaii, Solar Flares and Volcanos

"Oozy lava and solar cannonballs:  Here are two hot spots we can’t extinguish" PBS NewsHour 10/30/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  There are moments when the power of nature and the elements and the destruction they can cause simply capture everyone’s attention and make you wonder about your place in the universe.

This week, the lava flow on Hawaii’s Big Island that’s forced people to abandon homes and a sunspot the size of planet Jupiter are providing such a moment.

Hari Sreenivasan has a look at the scientific phenomena behind all this.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  The National Guard itself began trying to help Hawaiians today.  The lava that began flowing this summer from the volcano on Mount Kilauea is endangering a small community of about 950 residents.

It may be moving slowly, at speeds of just five to 10 miles an hour, but there’s been no way to stop it.  And now it’s started to burn homeowners’ property there.

At the same time, a whole different set of fiery images from space may also be in your daily news feed.  It’s the largest sunspot in more than two decades.  Federal officials have warned frequently about the possibility that solar flares could potentially disrupt navigation systems and radio frequencies.

Science correspondent Miles O’Brien is with us again tonight.

So, Miles, let’s start with this planet first.

When we think of lava, we think of huge explosions and volcanoes like Mount Saint Helens or other places, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour):  No.  No.

With Mount Saint Helens, the more recent volcano eruption in Japan, what we had was called a pyroclastic flow.  And that’s like a — think of it as a steam-heated hurricane.  It can travel at — in excess of 100 miles per hour, carry boulders with it, and can catch people off guard, as we saw most recently in Japan.

This is the other side of the equation for volcanoes, these oozy lava volcanoes that you see in Hawaii which have been erupting sort of in sort of slow motion.  And they move and the fissures crack and lava appears in different places.  And what we’re seeing here now is, of course, as the lava changes its pattern, the patterns of human settlement have changed as well.

There are more people living there.  And that’s where the collision is right here.