Snow, ice and wind put astronomy on pause atop Mauna Kea

HILO (HawaiiNewsNow) - The summit of Mauna Kea has been blanketed with a mantle of snow for the past several weeks.

It looks beautiful from lower elevations, but weather conditions atop Hawaii’s tallest mountain have been brutal, preventing everyone from getting to the summit, including scientists and astronomers.

With the latest cold front, temperatures have dropped into the 20s, while winds have topped 100 miles per hour.

That has forced astronomers to leave the summit.

“We evacuate the summit at 65 miles an hour,” said Mary Beth Laychak with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. “So we’re not just a little over our wind limits, we are substantially over our wind limits.”

The weather also has meant a loss of time that would be spent scanning the heavens to discover new galaxies, stars, planets and asteroids.

“In fact I did some research and our previous longest stretch was in 2015. We had 15 nights shut down. And this one is now 21 nights in a row,” said Randy Campbell. science operations lead at the W.M. Keck Telescope.

It’s not just time lost, but valuable opportunities to collect data that astronomers can’t get back.

“Because of the way we operate at Keck, where people are scheduled six months ahead of time, if you lose to weather, you just have to wait ‘til next year,” said Campbell.

It’s not just the wind that’s a factor. It may look like nice, fluffy now atop the mountain.

But that’s not the case.

“Unfortunately on Mauna Kea, because of the wind and then the sun, the snow melts. And then it gets cold again, and so everything just turns into this really hard block of ice,” said Nahua Guilloz of the Center for Maunakea Stewardship, which is responsible for managing access to the observatories.

“It’s basically like spraying from your garden hose, water everywhere, it flash freezes and you build up ridiculous amounts of ice,” said Doug Simons, director of the UH Institute For Astronomy.

That combination also created a weird phenomenon outside the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope -- a carpet of icicles that point upward.

“Now, with the combination of high winds, very low temperature and high humidity, we’re actually having ice that’s forming up from the ground,” said Laychak.

Since snowplows are unable to cut their way through the ice, there’s no timeline on when the road to the summit will reopen.

“It’ll take a little while, but we’re hoping to get the road open and enjoy the snow, because it is absolutely beautiful,” said Guilloz.

The telescopes are built to withstand strong winds and cold temperatures, and there have been no reports of damage.

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