What's the tallest mountain on Earth?

Everest, right? Well, yeah: if you're measuring from sea level. If you're measuring from the top of the crust the mountain rises from though, it's Mauna Kea, Hawai'i. It's about ~13,800 feet above sea level, but it rises ~33,500 feet from the oceanic crust to the peak (that's compared to Everest's mere ~29,000 feet from base to peak. So... you could say that Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain on our planet... (you could!)

On Thanksgiving day, my friend Lily and I took a drive up to the top of Mauna Kea, and did a little hike up there at high elevation. Today, I'd like to share some photographs of that excursion. We saw some pretty cool geology.

On the drive up the mountain, we saw an animal which was apropos, considering the day:

Gobble, gobble, gobble. Watch out turkeys, we'll be back after we work up an appetite...

Here's Lily's jeep in the "saddle" between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, looking north (with Mauna Kea in the background and basaltic lava flows from Mauna Loa in the foreground):


Some cider cones (the Hawai'ian word for cinder cone is pu'u) in the saddle:


Turning the other way (looking south), you can see the bulky form of "the long mountain," Mauna Loa. What a classic shield volcano shape! I love the fact that it's so dang wide it makes a lousy photograph. You just can't capture its spread-out bulk in a photo; it's too massive:


This was the spot where I pretended to have my toes overrun by a pahoehoe flow:


As we drove up the road to the top of the mountain, I was amazed at the raw volcanic landscape, decorated with cinder cones like this one:


At one point, we passed a neat little angular unconformity on the roadside. Here it is, with a nickel (white dot left of center) for scale:


Here's a closer-shot of this small angular unconformity. Earlier layers of ash and lapilli were deposited at a steep angle, and then eroded (perhaps by glaciation? pure speculation there) before more ash and lapilli were deposited atop it, at a lower angle. There's not likely to be much time missing here, and so perhaps it's better to think of this as the top of a cross-bed, an advancing front of pyroclastic deposition moving down the mountainside, overrun by later eruptions, which may have scoured off the upper few inches (??? pure speculation) or so before deposition.

Really, the truncated tops of cross-beds are mini-angular-unconformities, when you think about it; just not with the same amount of time missing at a "real" angular unconformity (with millions of years missing) due to mountain building like the one at Siccar Point. (Video of cross-beds forming)

Here's something else which the clueless geologist might mistake for a sign of mountain building:
No, those aren't originally-horizontal strata that have later been folded. They're layers (again of ash and lapilli) deposited on the originally-rough topography of the mountainside, covering small ridges and filling small valleys. Where a given layer is exposed at higher elevation, I interpret to be a paleo-topographic high; where that same stratum is exposed at lower elevation, that's a paleo-topographic low. The roadcut reveals these layers have undulating shapes, but this is unlikely to be folding that results from tectonic compression: instead, I think it's showing us the lay of the ancient land surface.

Looking south, we could see past Mauna Loa to the actively erupting steam vent coming out of Halemaumau Crater at Kilauea Caldera (source of the vog!):


Near the summit of Mauna Kea, there are a bunch of astronomical observatories:






On the summit is where you find those examples I mentioned the other day of hawaiite, a rock of basaltic composition that is very dense (ostensibly due to erupting beneath the extra pressures of a Pleistocene ice cap):


Here's me on the summit:


View to the north from the summit: More cinder cones...


Here's a YouTube video of me pointing stuff out from the summit (Kilauea, Hualalai, Mauna Loa, observatories, hikers, etc.). Unfortunately the wind makes it all but unintelligable, but I filmed it, doggone it, so I'm going to post it:



I found a beautiful example of a volcanic bomb up there:


After the visit to the summit, we went for a hike to a small supposedly-glacially-gouged-out lake below the summit (Lake Waiau):


Here's a Google Map, showing the lake's location:


I was surprised to see a thick biofilm on the bottom of the lake:


Encrusting the pebbles and cobbles there, it reminded me of Nora Noffke's modern and Archean biofilm photos in the recent GSA Today, as well as my "Life in Extreme Environments" class this past summer at Montana State University.


We saw some nice examples of structural geology on this hike. Previously, I've mentioned plumose structure, a branching pattern on the topography of fracture surfaces in fine-grained rocks. We saw some of that on blocks of basalt atop Mauna Kea, as in this example (again a repeat photo, but the other day I showed it to you for the vesicle; today I'm showing it to you for the plumose structure.)


A similar feature are arrest lines, which again are minute variations in the surface of a fracture. Like plumose structure, which branches from a source point (where the fracture initiated) and branches out in the direction of propagation, arrest lines tell us about the development of a joint. Unlike plumose structure, though, they are not parallel to the propagating fracture front. Instead, they form perpendicular to it, and record how the fracture propagates in small "steps." Each of these arrest lines is interpreted as being a spot where the fracture grew a little bit, then stopped ("arrested") and then grew some more. In this case, the fracture face we're looking at started at the bottom of the picture and grew towards the top of the photo. You can even see some less-discernible plumose structure backing this up:

Similar arrest lines can be seen in basalt images here and here...

We also saw some pretty spectacular xenoliths. Here's one of gabbro in basalt:


Here's one of peridotite in basalt:


And a few more:



My boots, with another volcanic bomb:


Driving back down the mountain afterwards, we got this nice view of the cinder cones (pu'us!) in the eastern part of the "saddle" between Maunas Kea and Loa:


This Mauna Kea excursion was one of my favorite things that I did on my all-too-brief trip to Hawaii. It was great to get up in the high country, where the air is thin (and vog free!) and the skies are deep blue, and the geology is surprisingly varied (at least it was surprising to me, and pleasantly so). The hike let us work up a good appetite, so we headed back down the mountain and straight to Thanksgiving dinner!

Labels: basalt, birdies, geology, glacial landforms, hawaii, igneous, mountains, msse, primary structures, structure, travel, unconformities, volcano, xenoliths