Question: what was it like when you went on the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory trip

Rebecca Williams answered on 20 Jun 2014:

Hi bfc10,
It was amazing, probably the best thing I have EVER done!

I worked there as a volunteer for 6 months. My job was to measure the gas coming out of the volcano – the amount of gas, and what type it is (carbon dioxide or sulphur dioxide) can tell you what the magma underneath the volcano is doing. So this helps us to try and work out if the volcano might erupt or not.

The obsevatory looks out over the crater at the summit of Kilauea Volcano, so it was a beautiful place to work. Every day was different. Some days I would walk out to places where the gas comes out of the ground, and I’d collect the gas in glass bottles to measure it in the lab. Some days I would drive a piece of scientific equipment underneath the cloud of gas to find out how much gas was coming out of the volcano. Other days I would have to build equipment in the lab – I learnt how to solder, how to build laptops and lots of other useful skills! Some days I would also help out with other jobs the observatory needed done, such as mapping out where the lava flows were. This meant hiking out to find the freshest lava and hiking around it, recording where it is using a GPS (like a scientific sat nav!).

At the weekends I would go for hikes or bike rides around the Volcanoes National Park. Or we would go to the beach – one of my favourite things to do was to go snorkelling. I once snorkelled with sea turtles! We also use to sometimes get up super early and hike out to see the sunrise over the lava flows where they were flowing into the sea, it was beautiful.