Chasing water

First things first: I have a new nephew. His name is Bessi and he's as cute as any newborn baby I've ever seen. Well, unfortunately I haven't seen him yet but I got a picture of him in the mail. Congratulations, Teitur and Ingunn and Auður!!

Second things second: I finally made it to Hawaii. Miracles still happen.

Third things... whatever. My head is spinning as I write this on my laptop in the Cornell mansion in Waimea town. Today and yesterday I drove over 200 miles on all kinds of roads and made it all the way around the Big Island. See, it's been raining a lot in Hawaii recently and I was out hunting for water in streams that normally run bone-dry. (Think of the Big Island as Reykjanes. The rocks are like a sponge and it has to rain a LOT before the water starts running on the surface. And, if it rains that much, you're likely to get floods. This makes the life of a grad student looking for surface water on the island very... interesting). After racing past the streams I know to run even if it hasn't been raining cats and dogs for a week (there are those streams, but not too many and I have samples from most all of them already) I found one tiny stream running south of Hilo.

But the kale wasn't sopið even if I was in the spoon (or something to that effect). Before I could start sampling I ran into this biker with a flat tire, 200$ biking shoes and a 2000$ bike. He invited himself for a ride home in my van and me being a well-brought up girl I gave him the ride. I also took the front wheel off his bike because he couldn't do it himself. But he had a sheep in the front yard and was therefore forgiven. Well, he was already forgiven when he asked if Cornell was in Chicago. Hail the Safety Ivy! Who would ever ask if Harvard was in Chicago??

Back where I started, I parked the van in somebody's driveway and hiked the few yards to the stream. I had barely gotten my sampling stuff out of my sack when someone drove into the driveway, so skillfully blocked by yours sincerely. As I walked back to move the car, this someone came walking towards me: a heavily tattoed guy with burned teeth and in a bad mood. "Who do you think you are, trespassing on private property? I own this house, and the stream, and the house on the other side of the stream, and... oh, you're a scientist?". And after promising him that I wasn't going to drown myself in the river (not that anyone could have, the stream simply wasn't up to the task) and that I didn't have any open cuts through which I could contract the local deadly disease and that I wouldn't sue him in any case, he allowed me to sample his stream. He even allowed me to park in his yard. And, best of all, his dog quit barking at me.

After spending the night at a campground in Volcanoes National Park, I continued my quest for water. Trials and errors and long, winding backroads took me to Wood Valley on the flanks of Mauna Loa, where the maps promised a whole bunch of ephemereal streams. Alas, none were up. Ever the optimist, I sampled a puddle in one dry streambed but the pH-reading on it showed me that it was most likely rainwater. What the hell, I'll just sample it anyway. And I drove back to the park, cursing all this uncooperative water, and went for a hike in Kilauea Iki crater.

This crater dates back to 1959. Although the floor of it, a veritable ocean of smooth, black lava, is solid and cold now there is still a lot of heat in the ground underneath and steam rises everywhere from the ground. The sun was out when I started my hike along the crater rim but by the time I descended into the crater rain started falling and I hiked across the floor of the crater in howling wind and pouring rain. Just like home in Iceland. In fact, I learned about this crater in my petrology class back at the University of Iceland and I was really excited to finally stand in the middle of it. A thunderstorm came in as I crossed the crater floor and I scared myself imagining that the volcano was waking up from it's long sleep. The dramatic effect of the thunder was absolutely frightening

The afternoon saw more driving around in circles through pouring rain, looking for water that didn't want to flow. Before I knew it I was on the west coast driving back to Waimea. Night had fallen and then all of a sudden the road to Waimea is blocked by cops, closed because of flash flooding. Just what I needed! I shifted my course towards the village of Waikoloa, where the floodwaters rushed through town, and got a much-coveted sample of surface runoff from the west coast. Yay! Us geologists are so weird, aren't we?

Tomorrow it better be raining still because I'm going out to sample some more. Monday I'm off to Kaua'i, the closest place I've ever been to Heaven on this Earth. This island is the oldest of the large Hawaiian islands and it's absolutely amazingly beautiful. I'll be there for a week sampling rivers and hiking, first along the Kalalau trail (by myself) and then in the Waimea Canyon (with a field assistant). As I said in a previous post, life does suck when one is a geologist. Right?