Mauna Loa Activity

[AaronM]

I was hoping that phrase would fade away with the pandemic

[TomK]

For those interested in the geology of Hawaii Island, there's a new paper in Nature regarding the correlation between Mauna Loa and Kilauea activity. In this case, they say the plumbing is not the connection but it's a result of strain that's induced in the rocks by magma-induced inflation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-24308-0

"Elastic interaction between Mauna Loa and Kīlauea evidenced by independent component analysis"

"[...]The results revealed anticorrelated ground deformation behaviour of the main calderas of Mauna Loa and Kīlauea, meaning that the opposite response is seen in the ground deformation of one volcano with respect to the other. At the same time, Kīlauea exhibits a more complex pattern, with an additional component, which appears not to be correlated with the dynamics of Mauna Loa. The GPS areal strain time series support these findings.[...]".

It's one of the longest abstracts I've ever read, by the way, in any science paper.