Battling Lava and Snowstorms, 2.5 Miles Above the Pacific

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/climate/mauna-loa-carbon-dioxide-eruption.html

By Raymond Zhong, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: Two and a half miles above the Pacific, with the combined exhalations of a vast swath of humankind and its cars and factories blowing toward him, Aidan Colton looked out over the volcano’s snow-streaked summit and lifted up a glass flask the size of a coconut. He held his breath — even the carbon dioxide from his lungs might corrupt the sample. After a moment, he opened the valve. The air he is collecting at Mauna Kea is feeding the world’s longest-running record of direct readings of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. ...in November, Mauna Loa erupted for the first time in almost 40 years. No one was hurt, but lava flows up to 30 feet deep toppled the observatory’s power lines and buried a mile of the main road up the mountain. The facility was paralyzed. It took a transoceanic scramble, and a dose of luck, for scientists with the Mauna Loa observatory to restart their readings — by taking them, for the first time, on Mauna Kea, the next volcano over....

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