People who are fortunate enough to live in or visit Hawai`i, or even those who have seen the right television documentaries, know that the majestic presence of erupting volcanoes attests to their raw power. If we took Kilauea (our own backyard volcano) and collected the lava that it erupted, there would be enough material to fill the gas tanks of about 1,000 Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) in the time it took you to read this sentence. And though Kilauea is a medium-to-small-sized volcano, it has been discharging lava nearly continuously at this rate for the past 24 years.

Demonstrations like this one, or catastrophic eruptions like those of Mount St. Helens or Mount Pinatubo, understandably cause people to sometimes think that human-caused effects on the biosphere are small compared to volcanic ones. But, as the saying goes, “it ain’t necessarily so.”

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