HAWAII FACTS!
Vsauce! Michael here, and I am back from vacation. You may not have known, but I just spent the last week in Hawaii with my mother and my sister. She's the one hiding right there. I worked on my tan, grew my beard back out, and most importantly, I learned a lot and I wanted to share some of that knowledge with you today.
In fact, on Saturday, I'm gonna release a brand new Vsauce Leanback, made out of videos from producers all over YouTube that I was inspired to watch after learning things in Hawaii. It's going to be exciting, but today, right now, let's get started and begin with Pearl Harbor.
In 1941, more than 300 Japanese fighters attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona was one of the many battleships damaged or sunk, and the Arizona was left right where it sank. It's still there, and a memorial has been built right on top of it. From the memorial, you can see something pretty surprising. The ship is still leaking fuel. It once held more than a million gallons of fuel, and so even today, 70 years later, it continues to leak five gallons of gas every day into the ocean. In fact, you can actually smell it from the memorial. The Navy hasn't fixed it yet because the leak is seen as a constant reminder of what happened and as tears that have continued to flow ever since the day of the attack.
Pearl Harbor also has this giant map, which shows you something else I was excited about being close to - the International Date Line. It's an arbitrary line where the new day begins. You see, when the Sun rises in the morning for these Pacific Islands, different days are beginning. In Samoa, it might be 9 in the morning on Thursday, but just a few hundred miles away, across the dateline, it's 9 in the morning on Friday. One day in the future.
This means that some pretty weird things can happen. For instance, Amelia Earhart disappeared without a trace while traveling from New Guinea to Howland Island. She was talking, communicating, and most definitely alive on July 3rd. But then she crossed the dateline and disappeared forever on July 2nd.
At the Dole Plantation, you can take a train called the Pineapple Express and see coffee being grown. Or you can visit Kona and toast the camera with coffee made from beans right below you. If you prefer softer beans, grab a shaved ice from Matsumoto with red beans at the bottom. Or eat some shrimp so fresh that they were grown in ponds right behind the shrimp shack.
This is the hospital Barack Obama was born in, and the top of Diamond Head, a volcanic tuff cone in Honolulu, has a great view of the city, but it's so windy that all around the steep sides are clumps of lost hats. By the way, the camera I've been using the entire time says it's waterproof, and to find out if it is, I'm gonna send my sister down. Good luck.
Finally, Mauna Kea, the highest point in Hawaii and, if measured from its seafloor base, a mountain taller than Mount Everest. It's above the clouds, so driving up is really freaky. You literally drive into and through the cloud line. The dry air, high altitude, and calm air make it perfect for observing space. I didn't get to use those telescopes, but people had smaller ones I could use pointed right at Saturn. I tried to get camera footage of it, and this is the best I could do.
To learn more about Saturn and Hawaii's volcanic activity and a whole host of other issues, be sure to watch our Leanback coming out this Saturday. It's an autoplaying playlist that I host full of video clips from producers all over YouTube, so they get the views, and if you like what they make, you can subscribe to them. Stay tuned for that. And as always, thanks for watching.