Sometimes you make a connection that floors you. This is one of them.
In July 2025 I was at a conference at the Turtle Bay Resort on the North Shore. Former Governor John Waiheʻe was speaking, and he did what he often does. He had the room leaning in as he wove together hard-won insights from decades of leadership. He is an incredible storyteller.
And then our phones buzzed, well, at least most of ours did. Mine didnʻt, but it became apparent something was going on. Then mine buzzed too.
Tsunami warning. Leave now. You are in a danger zone. This is not a drill. Or something like that.
I thought this might be another false alarm. Most of us remember the warning we got in January 2018 that a missile was on the way. You could see people Googling to verify the alert. This one was real.
After a few awkward minutes, the room settled and people started to talk story. A minority of the group decided to ride it out upstairs at the resort. I gave that a serious think over and felt it was a safe option, but decided to join my ʻohana back home and braved what was becoming some of the worst traffic of my life.
I am grateful no destructive wave came because I would not have made it out of the danger zone in time. I was also grateful that I had a self-driving car, at least for a bit. I used voice mode to make calls and talk to Google Gemini to figure out what I would do if I got stuck on the coast.
I started toward the Kāneʻohe way, switched directions toward Wahiawā, found traffic was worse and switched back.
It didnʻt matter. Both sides were backed up for hours, and I started to estimate how much time I had before the wave came. Both ways home run right along the coastline, the worst possible place to be in a tsunami.
I know this was wrong, but I swiped my phone more than a few times to switch between calls and Googleʻs Gemini while in self driving mode. I was looking for a place to ditch my car and hike to higher ground if I had to.
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My car warned me. Pay attention to the road. I think after the third warning, it banned me from self-driving for a day. I didnʻt know that was a thing, and I agree that kind of protection should be in place. I drove inch-by-inch the rest of the way myself.
About halfway home, now without Google Gemini, I started thinking about what I wrote in my upcoming book about Hawaiʻiʻs role in catalyzing the worldʻs scientific tsunami warning system. The first warning was triggered about a hundred years ago by a quake from the same region, Kamchatka.
That also made me think about research I had read on the unusual bend in the chain of our underwater mauna. They march nearly 4,000 miles from their birthplace over our Hawaiian hotspot and end up diving under a plate at Kamchatka.
And then it hit me. The plate carrying our oldest mauna had just shaken Kamchatka and sent a tsunami back toward home. Our mauna can still send us messages millions of years after they have lost their fire.
Let me back up a bit.
(Courtesy: USGS)
Thomas Jaggar started an observatory on the rim of Kīlauea. He saw patterns on his seismographs that connected earthquakes and tsunamis. In late 1922 he detected an earthquake in Chile and ran the numbers. He predicted it would create a tsunami and he was right.
A few months later, in February 1923, he picked up an earthquake off Kamchatka. He ran the numbers and predicted that a tsunami would strike Hawaiʻi. He warned the Hilo harbormaster and told him when it would strike. The harbormaster did not take him seriously.
The tsunami hit Hilo as predicted, and a fisherman died.
Ten years later, after a big quake off Japan, Hilo got another warning. This time people listened, and no one died.
Jaggar kicked off an era of scientific tsunami warnings. What Hawaiʻi built after Jaggar still influences how the world warns people today.
On April 1, 1946, a tsunami from Alaska killed 159 people across our islands. The observatory Jaggar founded detected the quake about five hours before the wave hit Hilo, but no one was there to read it. Three years later, the first U.S. tsunami warning center was founded here in ʻEwa Beach to watch the Pacific Ocean, so the next quakes would not go unread.
Innovations to save lives did not stop there. In 1960, a tsunami from Chile killed 61 people in Hilo even though the sirens sounded. Too many people did not know what the sirens meant. So Hawaiʻi invented and built Civ-Alert, a way for Civil Defense to interrupt every radio station at once, and later television.
What we catalyzed here was exported. Warning systems in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean were largely based on our Pacific model. Federal officials studied Civ-Alert before creating the national Emergency Broadcast System in 1963.
Today that system lives on as the Emergency Alert System, still cutting into TV and radio when we need to be warned. These really are islands of innovation.
Back to our mauna and that bend.
Look at this annotated map. Most of us know about our long chain of Hawaiian islands. But it does not end there. For reasons still debated, our Hawaiian chain bends northward.
There are a couple of leading theories. Iʻd recommend reading the papers. They are fascinating. Regardless of the reason, our oldest surviving mauna end up at Kamchatka, at the far end of a chain almost 4,000 miles long.
Right now, a massive old mauna called the Meiji Seamount sits at the edge of the trench off Kamchatka, next in line to dive under. It was born about 82 million years ago over the same hotspot that is building Hawaiʻi Island today, yet carries a Japanese emperorʻs name.
I studied Russian in Moscow. I was a volunteer teacher at the Cheboksary Electromechanical College from 2000 to 2002, an engineering college in the heartland of Russia. It was a special Peace Corps assignment where the Russian government opened up their borders for a few years to a limited number of volunteers. I was an oddball kanaka ʻōiwi, teaching in Cheboksary and deeply involved in community life there.
People there asked me a million questions about Hawaiʻi. I spent two years explaining where I came from. I never knew a piece of where I came from was already there in Russian waters, linked to us for millions of years.
Stay curious, folks. Some of our deepest connections sit quietly out of sight until we wander off to find them.
