Dr. Richard S. Fiske

National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

 

We close this day with a humanistic view of volcanoes and their impacts on people who live near them, with special emphasis on Hawaii and Japan. The volcanoes of Hawaii have reputations for gentle, highly photogenic eruptions, but ongoing research shows that they on occasion can be sites of unbelievably violent eruptions. About 1200 years ago, dense rocks the size of grapefruit, torn from 5-7 km deep inside Kilauea volcano, were thrown to distances of 8 km. Such eruptions could occur in the future, but fundamental mechanisms are still so poorly understood that we do not yet know what precursors to look for that might provide advance warning. Kilauea's neighbor volcano Mauna Loa has recently begun to re-inflate after almost 20 years of quiescence, raising the possibility that it could send lava flows into populated areas on the Big Island of Hawaii. Yes, the volcanoes of Hawaii are photogenic and are visited by more than 2.5 million tourists each year, but the hazards they pose are very real.

Japan has been called a land of volcanoes, and people there have been blessed by their beauty and cursed by their destructive powers for centuries. Today, we look south of Japan for insights emerging from the chain of giant sea-floor volcanoes lying along the front of the Izu-Bonin arc. This research, led by scientists of the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC), has produced startling scientific results, including the discovery of a huge deposit of sulfide minerals, rich in gold and silver, that is currently growing on the floor of Myojin Knoll submarine caldera 400 km south of Tokyo. This, and other such mineral deposits that may be discovered in the future, may herald the beginning of sea-floor mining in the throats of these once-violent volcanoes.

 

 

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