Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Kohala (mountain)
Summary
Kohala is the oldest of five volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaii. Kohala is an estimated one million years old—so old that it experienced, and recorded, the reversal of Earth's magnetic field 780,000 years ago. It is believed to have breached sea level more than 500,000 years ago and to have last erupted 120,000 years ago. Kohala is in area and in volume, and thus constitutes just under 6% of the island of Hawaii.
Kohala is a shield volcano cut by multiple deep gorges, which are the product of thousands of years of erosion. Unlike the typical symmetry of other Hawaiian volcanoes, Kohala is shaped like a foot. Toward the end of its shield-building stage 250,000 to 300,000 years ago, a landslide destroyed the northeast flank of the volcano, reducing its height by over and traveling across the sea floor. This huge landslide may be partially responsible for the volcano's foot-like shape. Marine fossils have been found on the flank of the volcano, far too high to have been deposited by standard ocean waves. Analysis indicated that the fossils had been deposited by a massive tsunami approximately 120,000 years ago.
Because it is so far from the nearest major landmass, the ecosystem of Kohala has experienced geographic isolation, resulting in a unique ecosystem. There are several initiatives to preserve this ecosystem against invasive species. Crops, especially sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), have been cultivated on the Leeward side of the volcano for centuries. The northern part of the island is named after the mountain, with two districts named North and South Kohala. King Kamehameha I, the first King of the Kingdom of Hawaii, was born in North Kohala, near Hawi.
File:Location Kohala.svg|thumb|left|200px|The location of Kohala relative to the other volcanoes of the island
poly 139 238 152 201 174 178 207 170 235 133 269 157 250 186 216 205 [[Kilauea]]
poly 65 65 97 105 138 126 229 113 236 134 207 171 174 180 151 201 139 237 121 259 97 286 57 261 48 240 56 197 39 159 60 157 85 127 63 90 47 90 54 74 [[Mauna Loa]]
poly 67 55 66 65 99 106 121 115 140 127 213 116 215 88 186 59 121 33 106 52 [[Mauna Kea]]
poly 39 158 61 159 85 127 65 89 40 89 20 105 20 122 [[Hualalai]]
desc bottom-left
Studies of the volcano's lava accumulation rate have put the volcano's age at somewhere near one million years.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.