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 live
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 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 comair 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.
