GEOLOGIC QUESTIONS FOR THE MEGAPROBER

[megaprober]

the other questions i'll have to answer later tonight. lgranze yours is a good one and there were a couple of others i'll get to when i get back online later tonght.

[megaprober]

melakilo remeber what we talked about.....you have to stop obsessing about my penis. no means no if anybody wants to find melakakili he said he'll be cruising at the bath-house near queens beach

[Puerto_Rico_Surfer]

cmon now guys lets all just lighten up, it was funny for a few posts, but lets just call it even with a good laugh.

[Puerto_Rico_Surfer]

Hope this helps give everyone a laugh.


Keep this philosophy in mind the next time you either
hear, or are about to repeat a rumor.

In ancient Greece (469 - 399 BC), Socrates was widely
lauded for his wisdom. One day the great philosopher came
upon an acquaintance who ran up to him excitedly and
said, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one
of your students?"

"Wait a moment," Socrates replied. "Before you tell me
I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the
Triple Filter Test."

"Triple filter?" the student said.

"That's right," Socrates continued. "Before you talk to
me about my student let's take a moment to filter what
you're going to say. The first filter is Truth. Have
you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell
me is true?"

"No," the man said, "actually I just heard about it
and..."

"All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know if
it's true or not. " Now let's try the second filter, the
filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me
about my student something good?"

"No, on the contrary..."

"So," Socrates continued, "you want to tell me something
bad about him, even though you're not certain it's true?"

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.

Socrates continued. "You may still pass the test
though, because there is a third filter - the filter of
Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student
going to be useful to me?"

"No, not really"

Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me
is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to
me at all?"

The man was defeated and ashamed. This is the reason
Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high
esteem.

It also explains why he never found out that
Plato was banging his wife.

[megaprober]

EARTHQUAKE/ROCKSLIDES OF HAWAII

an excellent question and one that most in the profession want to talk about and one that property officials and other government people don't want to hear about.

here the deal. the islands of hawaii are extremely unstable when being constructed and for a good million years of so after completion...case closed no rebuttle can prove otherwise it's a fact. the islands stabalize themselves through the use of gravity. case in point look at the lava benches of kilauea. the benches are build on shattered glass fragments from lava that on contact with the sea exploded into tiny glass particles. once the glass sand beach builds up enough true lava will cover the area and build out into the sea a lava delta. so you now have a massive rock delta over a glassy very movable sand/glass base. this is what i like to call the glass skirt . it forms at the base of all new or active volcanoes and is unfortunately the base on which mush larger unstable rock rests upon. every year you hear stories of bench collapse. some are large and other are massive. unfortunately although a great spectacle to witness if you are on the bench you get a free express trip to the bottom of the ocean. point is people die almost every decade from this....not just tourists wondering, but locals alike...the collapses are not prejudice and everything goes. over thousands of years these repeated collapses build a gentle more stable slope so that the island can eventually grow outward and expand. this is the best case scenerio.

the worst case scenerio is what happens when the islands get to such a large size that even the collapsed benches are no longer able to support the newly aquired weight of the young volcano. the whole volcano will eventually begin to slump on an island wide scale. this happens in an area that lacks support such as the leeward and winward coasts of this island, the southeast side of haleakala and of course kilauea. on kilauea large steplike terraces are easily seen when driving down the chain of craters road. given time these terraces reach failure and the whole section goes creating catastrophic earthquakes and waves. the island of oahu was at least 3X the size and another 10,000ft higher than it is now. massive collapses have occured on both the leeward and winward sides. if you look at an under water topographic map the waianae slump is real obvious and the rock debris from the nuuanu slide can be traced over 70 miles away ending directly north of molokai. potential places for disaster from this geologist. southeast haleakala probably the largest and worst case. there has been little large scale collapse on this volcano and the channel between maui and the big island is the deepest offering little support for the immense weight of haleakala and, get this, because the big island weighs so much it is actually bowing upward the oceans crust in a roughly 200 mile diameter lifting the island of oahu slightly....ie all the exposed reefs along the coasts. as the big island sinks and the outer perimeter lifts there has to be a pivotal point somewhere in between, say like a seesaw, that point is currently under maui. in english, maui is actually being tilted toward the big island thus putting more weight on an already unstable coastline

should we be concerned....well i have other things to worry about like food on the table and getting a decent set wave on any given day, but it will happen again i guarantee it

[megaprober]

HOW OLD IS KAENA POINT?

work done by howard sterns and gordon mcdonald concluded that the age of the waianae volcano was between 3-4 million years. later work by my advisor at UH by way of radiometric dating yielded ages around 3.4 million years old and that was in the vacinity of the kolekloe pass. what does this mean it means that the main mass of the waianae volcanoe was done by around 3 million years, kaena point included. that only tells part of the story basically how old the rocks are that make it. too truly get a grasp on the age one has to think about how long does it take to remove the upper 2/3 of the waianae volcano and at what point did the ocean actually reach its hightest point in order to begin creating the seacliff and reef bench that make up the point today. the reef rock today is thought to be in the order of 200,000-125,000yrs old depending on which plus 90 meter stand of sea level it took to eat away the seacliff. my guess is that the point has looked the same for roughly the past 100,000yrs with many fluctuations in sea level, but none that were much higher than today.

[nobody]

mahalos. megster...

if haleakala were to "go", what kind of tsunami effects would it have?

i saw something on tv that showed giant ruts in the great barrier reef off oz. they say it was caused by pieces falling off of molokai, kalaupapa, in particular.

oh, i don't worry about stuff like that, too. can we change it? hell no.

it's just interesting, that's all.

mahalo

[LGREANZ]

Wow thats friggin amazing. So one day Maui might have some big problems happenin.
And our reefs are getting shallower, woo hoo, I lieky shallow reef pits.
I w s told the story of the Na Pali coast of Kauai and how it slid out into the pacific. from what I wsas told is that Kauai at one time was double the size and it pretty much broke in half , for along time geologist couldn't explain the reason for the Na Pali cliffs but recently they have discovered the land mass over 100 miles north of the isalnd chain.

Any other info pertaining to that ?
Is the story authentic ?

[malekos]

"Recent studies by USGS marine scientists have identified over fifteen giant landslides surrounding the Hawaiian Islands. The slides are among the largest known on Earth, and most have occurred within the past four million years. The youngest is thought to have occurred only one hundred thousand years ago, and there is evidence today that large blocks of land on the island of Hawaii are beginning to slide, generating large earthquakes in the process. Each slide has resulted in huge land losses to the islands and resulted in large waves that have carried rocks and sediments as high as 1000 ft above sea level. The giant Hawaiian landslides are important to study because, although they occur infrequently, they have potential for enormous loss of life, property, and resources. Much of the existing topography in Hawaii, both on land and on the seafloor, owes its origin to these landslides, and as such they are crucial to understanding and evaluation of nearly all of the Hawaiian habitats and resources."- from my school book

[megaprober]

maleko..just wondering if that's "volcanoes of the sea"? 'cause if there's some other books floating around i've missed i'm interested. not to be vain, but i've tried to read anything i can on hawaiian geology and aside from visits at UH i've had trouble finding anything new or up to date.

"volcanoes of the sea" was a "the book" in its day, but now in 2004 it's a bit out dated and i've even thrown the idea at UH to do a third edition. with luck they will because here is where all the current work is being done and believe me there has been so much research done since '86.

[Guest]

ANY QUESTION ABOUT GEOLOGY IS FINE....ALLTHOUGH THE BET IS WITH EMPHASIS ON HAWAII. NO QUESTION IS A BAD ONE

No question a bad one... about hawaii... Mmmmm tasty beer...

How much does this indigenous, volcanic rock weigh?

[sloan]

woops... that was me. Gotta make sure it registered in case I win da beer...

[malekos]

maleko..just wondering if that's "volcanoes of the sea"? 'cause if there's some other books floating around i've missed i'm interested. not to be vain, but i've tried to read anything i can on hawaiian geology and aside from visits at UH i've had trouble finding anything new or up to date.

i guess you owe me the beer or food. eh?

[megaprober]

my guess is 12.5 pounds, but i'm drunk and will have to re-evaluate tomorrow. aloha

[sloan]

my guess is 12.5 pounds, but i'm drunk and will have to re-evaluate tomorrow. aloha

Wait a minute... could you see through my black scribbling on the scale? How can that be... Son of a bitch... The scale read EXACTLY 12.5, no shit. ( I'm actually serious - no joke )

This sucks... I had a fool proof plan for the beer... you gotta be kidding me. Well, I have to give you credit, that was pretty impressive.

I shoulda used a bigger rock...
- schlumpf