STAR-BULLETIN / 1999 Hiker and former Star-Bulletin reporter Alan Matsuoka stood at 10,000 feet on Mauna Loa volcano as clouds parted allowing distant views after a snowfall.

Mauna Loa’s true
dimensions revealed

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By William McCall
Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. >> If Mauna Loa were standing on dry land instead of jutting out of the Pacific Ocean, it would reach 55,757 feet into the sky -- far above the top cruising altitude for jets, a new study says.

The massive base of the volcano that helped form the Big Island would stretch about 90 miles from edge to edge -- nearly the distance from New York to Philadelphia.

An average construction dump truck can carry about 10 cubic yards of dirt, so if Mauna Loa were bulldozed, new measurements indicate it would take nearly 10.4 trillion truckloads to clear it away.

Compared with Mount Hood, another volcano and the highest peak in Oregon at 11,235 feet, Mauna Loa is 375 times as big -- or bigger than the planet Jupiter is compared to Earth.

"Mauna Loa is so massive that it deforms the oceanic plate on which it sits," said Grant Kaye, an Oregon State University researcher who did the recent study yielding the most precise measurements ever recorded for Mauna Loa.

Kaye was among the scientists sharing new data about how the physical world works at this week's 98th annual Cordilleran Section meeting of the Geological Society of America.

Other studies presented at the conference included evidence there are roughly five times more faults off the coast of northern California and southern Oregon than previously believed.