Big Island: Fire and Stars

Volcanoes, observatories, and the long science of a living island

Six stops across the Big Island, where the same volcanic ground that is still being born also gives science its clearest instruments. The route runs from Kilauea's caldera -- where lava buried the town of Kalapana whole in 1990 -- down Chain of Craters Road, which lava has covered in 41 of 53 years, then up Mauna Kea, taller than Everest from its ocean-floor base and crowned with thirteen telescopes on sacred ground, and ends on the north flank of Mauna Loa, where one man's CO2 readings became the Keeling Curve.

Itinerary

1. Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park — In 1823 the missionary William Ellis stood at Kilauea's rim and wrote, "We stopped and trembled." Two centuries later the park still earns that reaction: 354,461 acres running from sea level to the 13,679-foot summit of Mauna Loa, where lava pours from vents and cools into new land while you stand close enough to feel the heat.
2. Kilauea — In 1990, lava swallowed the town of Kalapana whole -- houses, a church, a store, all buried under basalt in weeks. Kilauea did not pause. The most active volcano on Earth has been doing this for 200,000 years, and its December 2024 eruption sent fountains over 450 meters into the Hawaiian sky.
3. Chain of Craters Road — Somewhere beneath the lava fields at its southern end lies the buried town of Kalapana. This 19-mile road drops 3,700 feet from Kilauea's summit to the sea, past pit craters that simply collapsed, and lava has covered part of it in 41 of the past 53 years. It is a road perpetually being unmade.
4. Mauna Kea: The Mountain Taller Than Everest — Mauna Kea rises only 13,796 feet above sea level, but its base sits nearly 20,000 feet down on the ocean floor -- over 33,500 feet in all, taller than Everest. Its summit, above 40 percent of the atmosphere, is the piko that connects Earth to the heavens for Native Hawaiians, and the best astronomical site on Earth.
5. Mauna Kea Observatories — Thirteen telescopes operated by eleven nations crown the summit on 525 acres of cinder. The twin Keck mirrors, Japan's Subaru, and the Submillimeter Array that helped image the first black hole all peer from here -- and in 2019 thousands of protectors blockaded the access road against the Thirty Meter Telescope.
6. Keeling Curve — On the north flank of Mauna Loa, at 11,134 feet, Charles David Keeling set up an infrared gas analyzer in March 1958 and began measuring CO2 with a precision no one had tried. Within two years his sawtooth line was climbing -- 313 parts per million then, past 400 in 2013 -- the first undeniable proof that humanity was changing the air itself.