Hawaiian volcanoes are way older than thought, and there's life down 1.6 miles

Hawaiian volcanoes are dramatically more complex—and far older—than scientists have been teaching—and there are traces of life more than a mile deep in the rock. Those are just a few of the remarkable findings of a truly quirky idea: Let's drill miles down into the lava on the Big Island and see what we find.The goal was to collect a continuous sample of of a million years of volcanic activity, reaching rock dating from a time when Mauna Kea was younger than the nascent volcano Lo'ihi is now.

The core was started in an abandoned quarry near Hilo Airport. It was selected because it was midway between active rift zones of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, so there would be less likelihood of hitting molten rock.The first pilot hole was put down in 1993, and a 3-kilometer deep core was taken in 1999. The drilling went on for several years, and the coring stopped when the site reached 11,500 feet—more than two miles down.

“There are problems with age-dating Hawaiian lavas,” but research suggests the lavas at the bottom of the hole are 700,000 years old said geochemist Donald M. Thomas, director of Center for the Study of Active Volcanoes at the University of Hawai'i's Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, a part of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. The coring project has spawned dozens of scientific papers.

In one of the most recent, published yesterday (Feb. 15, 2009), researchers from Germany, Japan and the United States reported that they could calculate the rate at which volcanic glass cooled—and could tell, for instance, whether lava was erupted above or below the surface of the ocean.In a 2006 meeting, researchers reported on some of the many findings of the project.