🌋 PELE:
Hawaiʻi Volcanoes

The ecocide story is a hell of a parable and mostly wrong. Satellites mapping rock gardens, 800 years of rainfall read out of lake mud, and a salinity meter walked along a coastline — three different tools, three different teams, same conclusion. The Rapanui did not destroy themselves.

Two days after UNR switched on the Tahoe Environmental Observatory Network, I started reading it. No API documentation, then or now. Ten endpoint slugs guessed from a truncation pattern, forty-three sensors that turned out to be thirteen devices, a soil pH of 1.8, and a five-digit parameter code that turned out to be the pollutant the lake’s TMDL actually regulates. Plus nine things I got wrong.

It started with a photo of a 1983 Referee’s Screen on Instagram. Four browser games and two thousand lines of JavaScript later — a shared engine, dice with real silhouettes and synthesized audio, and a survival game built on genuine USGS topo tiles of Railroad Valley, Nevada, where every distance and walking time is computed rather than invented. Plus three things I got wrong in public.

The Hawk Fire crossed Peavine Mountain north of Reno on 22 August. Ninety-two minutes after ignition a satellite saw it burning 315 metres from an aspen grove carved with a century of Basque sheepherders’ names. What free public satellite data can establish about one hillside from eight hundred miles away — and what it can never tell you.