Monthly Archives: December 2012

In many cases our aquariums represent an extension of ourselves. Some people like zoa’s, some people like acans, and some people even like non-photosynthetic corals. My passion is “ugly” fish. Are they really ugly or are they just misunderstood? I’ve always had interest in keeping unusual pets. Mainly for the conversation-provoking aspect of having a pet that people do not see very often. Triggerfish were of interest to me but I found early on that many of them were too aggressive with many of the other fish I wanted to keep. As a result, I developed… More:

 Imagine a wave, a giant wave, rushing inland toward you. Imagine it keeps coming, and coming without any end in sight. You’re thinking of a tsunami. Now imagine the wave is more than 1000 ft high (300 m), enough to engulf the bottom 2/3 of the Empire State Building. This is a megatsunami. Speaking at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Dr. Gary McMurty (a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and co-instructor for a couple of geology courses I took as a grad student here UHM) reported his recent work showing that over the last 4 million years the Hawaiian Islands have experienced at least 15 megatsunamis. Unlike typical tsunamis, which are usually driven by earthquakes, Hawaiian megatsunamis are driven by catastrophic landslides as large sections of the volcanoes that build the islands cleave off and cavitate the ocean. Surprisingly, these landslides are… More: