Where will the next Hawaiian volcano be?
As we all know, there are no facts about the future. We cannot know for sure what will happen tomorrow, much less next year or 1,000 years from now. How, then, can we be so bold as to guess where the next volcano will form in Hawai`i, perhaps 100,000 years or more down the road? If volcanoes were scattered randomly throughout the Hawaiian Islands, no one could say where the next volcano might start erupting. It would be like trying to guess the winning number in the lottery. Once in a while someone gets lucky, but most of us lose. But volcanoes in Hawai`i are not lottery numbers. They occur in a remarkably systematic arrangement, and we have learned enough about this pattern to make a pretty good guess as to where the next volcano will form. For starters, the volcanoes get younger toward the southeast end of the island chain. The first Polynesians to settle in the islands recognized this, 19th-century naturalists confirmed it, and late 20th-century earth scientists found a reason for t
