Your friends in Hawaii are likely safe from Kilauea. Here’s why.

As someone with relatives in Hawaii, I’ve been touched by the friends who have reached out to me and my husband to see how our family is doing – and a bit bemused. My in-laws, – who are fine, thank you – live on Oahu, 200 miles from the Big Island, where the Kilauea volcano is reworking the landscape and laying waste to some residents’ dreams of paradise. Don’t be embarrassed, such misperceptions are widespread; many Hawaii-connected people are receiving similar missives. In response, a colleague sent out a helpful tweet marking a map of Hawaii with the islands labeled.

I realize that this confusion is due to the unfortunate fact that the name “Hawaii” is used in so many different contexts, and that the state’s geography is unfamiliar to most mainlanders. (That goes both ways: We’ve had friends and relatives from Hawaii expect to include a visit with us outside Washington, during their trips to New York City. When you live on an island that might only take an hour to circumnavigate – and where directionals are not north, south, east and west but ocean side, called “makai,” and mountain side, called “mauka” – it’s tough to grasp the vastness of the continental United States.)

So, I’d like to provide a public service by explaining what this non-Hawaii native has learned about the geography of Hawaii, and the duplicate names. Believe me, I do not do this out of any sense of superiority. Before my first visit with my future husband, I didn’t know the difference between Hawaii and Hawaii, either, and even my pronunciation of Oahu was shaky.

Hawaii can refer to a state, an island or a county. Geographically, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago, which means a group of scattered islands. There are eight main islands, seven of which are inhabited.

Every one of these islands is actually the peak of a mountain built by lava escaping the same hole in the Earth’s mantle that is causing today’s eruptions. As the Earth’s Pacific tectonic plate shifts toward the northwest, each mountain is moved off the hot spot in an infinitesimally slow assembly line. You can tell the age of the islands by their position. Kauai and Niihau, at 5 million years, are the oldest of the inhabited islands. But the very first atoll, Midway Atoll, is almost 28 million years old, and there’s a future island forming to the south of the Big Island. For now, it’s known as Loihi.