Qualla: Long Island, Madang Province

Long Island, Madang Province: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Public domain. The islanders called it the Time of Darkness. Sometime in the late 17th or early 18th century, the volcano at the heart of Long Island tore itself apart, and the sun went out. Ash blotted the sky as far away as the Rai Coast and Astrolabe Bay, more than a hundred miles across the water, where oral traditions still describe the day the world turned gray. The eruption erased virtually all life on the island itself. Nearly every plant, every insect, every bird - gone. Then, over the centuries that followed, life crept back. Scientists who visit today are watching that return in real time.

Image: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center | Public domain

Long Island, Madang Province: An Island Starts Over

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Long Island sits 55 kilometers north of the New Guinea mainland, separated by the Vitiaz Strait. Two stratovolcanoes rise from its body - Mount Reaumur and Cerisy Peak - the collapsed summits of a much larger complex that has exploded at least three times in the past 16,000 years...

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Long Island, Madang Province: A Lake Inside a Lake

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Public domain. Lake Wisdom plunges 360 meters into the caldera floor, and yet even in its deepest reaches, there is oxygen. Researchers have found chironomid larvae and mollusks living at the very bottom, in water where, by every usual rule of tropical crater lakes, nothing should survive. The ...

Image: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center | Public domain

Long Island, Madang Province: Recolonization

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Public domain. Scientists call this kind of landscape a natural laboratory. When nearly everything dies at once, and then a known amount of time passes, you get to watch the sequence of return. On Long Island the pioneers were plants that could float or fly their seeds across the strait - *Barr...

Image: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center | Public domain

Long Island, Madang Province: Charts, Cargo, and Radar

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Public domain. In 1643 the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman sailed past and sketched Long Island onto his charts as part of the New Guinea mainland - an understandable mistake, given the scale of the place and the cloud cover over the strait. Later European visitors filed their own reports. In 1897,...

Image: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center | Public domain

Long Island, Madang Province: Flying Over Long Island

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Public domain. From the air, the island reads like a geology textbook cross-section. The outer rim is forest and village; the center is lake; the lake holds a cone; the cone still smokes on quiet days. The population is small, scattered in coastal villages accessible mostly by boat. For pilots ...

Image: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center | Public domain