Guest Post: Remembering When Mauna Loa Last Awoke: The First 24 Hours (Part 1)

This week, I'm happy to have 3 guest posts by Zahra Hirji, a reporter for InsideClimate News (a non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate and energy issues) about the 30th anniversary of the 1984 eruption at Mauna Loa on Hawai'i. She also blogs about earth and space science for The Raptor Lab, and has previously written for EARTH magazine, Discovery News, the Bulletin of the Global Volcanism Network and Volcano Watch. In 2010, Hirji spent the summer working as a geology intern at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, kicking off her mantle-deep love of Hawaiian volcanoes. Last year, she attended MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and wrote about Hawaii’s volcanic risk in her master’s thesis, Living in the Shadow of Mauna Loa. This series of blog posts are an extension of that project. You can follow her on Twitter at @zhirji28. --------- Remembering When Mauna Loa Last Awoke: The First 24 Hours A departing scientist-in-chief, faulty equipment and a late-night eruption kicked off a startling 22-day event in the spring of 1984, Mauna Loa’s most recent awakening. Bob Decker’s bags were packed. After running a government-funded volcano observatory in Hawaii for five years, from 1979 to 1984, he was moving from the Big Island to northern California to work at a sister agency. Much of Decker’s final two years at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) were devoted to watching Mauna Loa, the only Hawaiian volcano in position to threaten the island’s largest city of Hilo to the northeast and residential neighborhoods to the southwest. After a few quiet years, the massive mountain had shown three key signs of awakening: increasing seismic, or earthquake, activity, a bulging mountainside and an expanding summit crater.