The birth of the Hawaiian Islands

The birth of the Hawaiian Islands has been matchlessly chronicled in the gospel according to Michener, always a wonder to reread: How in the bosom of the boundless deep, countless millions of years before the first men walked the earth, a massive fissure some 2,000 miles in length suddenly appeared, exuding torrents of white-hot, liquid rock which exploded on contact with the heavy, wet burden of water, sending columns of released steam upward for nearly four miles to break loose on the surface of the sea and form a cloud and signal to an unknowing world the start of what might one day be islands. And for 40 million years, more or less, the dense, volcanic basalt built up, layer after layer; and one day, there was another molten eruption from the earth's core, except that now it reached the surface of the sea, and there was a tremendous explosion as liquid rock struck water and air together, and there was land. And then still more millions of years, the rise and fall of that and myriad other volcanic isles, and wind and water brought the first tenuous plant and animal life -- perhaps the seeds of plants and trees, or a coconut washed up against a shore, or a bird from distant realms -- and then interspersed ice ages, and finally, in the latter days of time the creation of the Hawaii we know; of lush valley and precipice, of volcanic peaks (some still active) and palm-fringed blue water, and flowers, and white surf, some islands already receding back into the sea, others still growing.

Today you can look at a map of the plateaus and trenches and seamounts of the Pacific Ocean floor, and one feature, between the Aleutians and Australia, stands out. It is the great wall of the Hawaiian Range, set seemingly in the very middle of the Pacific. The range runs in almost a straight line for 1,600 miles, the mountains within it rising as much as 18,000 feet off the floor of the surrounding ocean, but only a few ever reaching the surface.

At the northwestern tip are the Midway Islands; then in the central section La Perouse rock and the Gardner Pinnacles, shards of once great volcanic islands which have been worn down, almost to extinction, by the forces of wind and rain and surf. And at the southeastern extremity of the range, there are the 20 islands of the state of Hawaii, seven of them inhabited. The largest of these is the most southeasterly, Hawaii, the "Big Island," bearing the name of the entire chain. It has 4,030 square miles, more than twice the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. The most heavily populated island is Oahu, 200 miles to the northwest; it has the city of Honolulu and 80 percent of the people but is only a seventh the size of the Big Island.