Mauna Loa

By: Angelyn Kutchinski

• I bet you thought that Mt Everest was the biggest Mountain on the planet…….but you are wrong Mauna Loa is because if you were to put Mt Everest and Mauna Loa side by side and measured them from the bottom of the ocean peak to the Mauna Loa is taller.

Mauna Loa is also named Long mountain and is located on the island of Hawaii. Since 1832 Mauna Loa has erupted 39 times and last erupted in 1984. This means that the eruption frequency is not very great

Location

Inflation

Mauna Loa has been inflating since May 2002 After 10 years of little by little deflation. The inflating did slow down in winter and spring 2003. Inflation was pretty steady in 2004 and the first half of 2005 this means that the magma in the magma chamber is starting to swell up!

Earthquake Activity

• Earthquakes under the volcano were very constant in july 2004 and continued all the way through Fall 2004. then it stopped being so frequent and slowed In 2005 with about a 10 week frequency. That earthquake swarm was the greatest number of such earthquakes since the beginning of the modern HVO earthquake catalog in the 1960s.

Location

• Mauna Loa is just North west of the volcano Kilauea. It is located 13,680 ft above sea level. At 60 miles long and 30 miles wide, Mauna Loa makes up half of the entire island.

• Mauna Loa is the largest active volcano in the world. Using this last measure of its height,( which is 16,400 feet tall) it is one of the tallest mountain in the world. directly beneath Mauna Loa, the sea floor on which it sits is pushed down by it adds an additional 26,000 ft.

Eruption

• Mauna Loa volcano has been erupting for at least 100,000 years (possibly more) from a primary volcanic center that is presently manifested by Moku'aweoweo crater at the mountain's summit.

Climate

• The climate of Mauna Loa changes all the time but is mostly hot. Near the coast, the climate is humid tropical with dry winters on the south Kona side and dry summers on the southeast side.

The eruption in 1984 was the eruption that ended a nine year period of sleeping. The eruption began suddenly, following a 3-year period of slowly building earthquake activity beneath the volcano that included a swarm of earthquakes 5 to 13 km deep in mid-September 1983. By daybreak on March 26, vents were feeding lava into a fast-moving flow that had advanced 9 km to the northeast and three less active, shorter flows that were advancing eastward.

Largest on the Volcano

• Rising gradually to more than 4 km above sea level, Mauna Loa is the largest volcano on our planet. Its long submarine flanks descend to the sea floor an additional 5 km, and the sea floor in turn is depressed by Mauna Loa's great mass another 8 km. This makes the volcano's summit about 17 km (56,000 ft) above its base! The enormous volcano covers half of the Island of Hawaii and by itself amounts to about 85 percent of all the other Hawaiian Islands combined.

Active

• Mauna Loa is one of the most active volcanoes on the planet and has erupted 33 times since 1843 and has had very active earthquakes under it from way before 1843 all the way up to 2007.

Silent Mountain

• What makes Mauna Loa such a big mountain is the way it was formed. As part of the Hawaiian islands, Mauna Loa is a volcano, just like many others found on the island chain. The volcanoes in the Hawaiian islands are different from the cone-shaped, explosive, "fire breathing" dynamos that most of us think of when volcanoes come to mind. Mauna Loa is one of many shield volcanoes that make up the Hawaiian Islands. These are volcanoes that, compared to their more violent companions, erupt slowly and quietly.

fissure

• In the case of the Hawaiian islands, the fissures were in the ocean floor. The lava cools as it comes in contact with the ocean water. The newly deposited lava raises the level of the ocean floor just in the area around the fissure

Hot Spots

• About 30 years ago people thought that volcanoes only happened at plate boundries but then Dr. Wilson said that there are "hot spots", under the earth's crust in some places. These are called “hot spots" because they are places where a lot of heat is concentrated in a small area. The heat causes the overlying rock to melt, forming magma

Hazards by Mauna Loa eruptions

• The principal hazards by Mauna Loa eruptions are its frequent, high-volume lava flows. These flows pose serious risks to people living on lower slopes and to their properties. The recent recognition of the extent of major landslides from the south and west flanks of Mauna Loa is another long term hazard there and at many other oceanic volcanoes.

When lava from Mauna Loa headed toward Hilo in 1984 residents saw it dozens of mils uphill but had no idea where it would hit. Fortunately it stopped after three weeks and hit

nothing. Now the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory has created new “lava inundation” maps of Mauna Loa, which give much more accurate pictures of where lava will go The maps only show where the flows would go. They tell nothing about when they might occur. Last summer, the observatory said the mountain was swelling slightly with

magma, suggesting a possible eruption in the future.

• No recent eruptions of the volcano have caused fatalities, but eruptions in 1926 and 1950 destroyed villages, and the city of Hilo is partly built on lava flows from the late nineteenth century. In view of the hazards it poses to population centers, Mauna Loa is part of the Decade Volcanoes program, which encourages studies of the most dangerous volcanoes.

• The volcano has probably been erupting for at least 700,000 years and may have emerged above sea level about 400,000 years ago, although the oldest-known dated rocks do not extend beyond 200,000 years. Its magma comes from the Hawaii hotspot, which has been responsible for the creation of the Hawaiian island chain for tens of millions of years. The slow drift of the Pacific Plate will eventually carry the volcano away from the hotspot, and the volcano will thus become extinct within 500,000 to one million years from now.

Bibliography

• http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/HCV/maunaloa.html• www.google.com• www.wikipedia.com• http://www.extremescience.com/MaunaLoa.htm• http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/mauna_loa/intro.html