One of the world’s most prestigious and storied surfing contests — dubbed the “Super Bowl of Surfing” — went forward Sunday in Hawaii for the first time in seven years with towering wave faces and a gigantic swell that was expected to grow throughout the day.

And this year female surfers competed alongside the men for the first time in the 39-year history of The Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational.

Pacific Island nations have urged Japan to delay the release of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant over fears it could contaminate fishing grounds.

A small town in Hawaii that experiences an astonishing 600 earthquakes a week is being rocked by a concentrated pool of magma directly beneath it, a study has found.

The number of earthquakes recorded in Pahala, a town in the south of the Big Island of Hawaii, has increased 70-fold since 2015, and seismologists have used modern imaging techniques to attribute the sharp rise to a web of magma connected to a nearby volcano.

The U.S. military and Hawaii officials said Friday the Air Force has returned 363 acres it leased on Molokai Island to the Department of Hawaiian Homelands, opening the possibility Native Hawaiians could move onto the land.

Almost everyone in Russia and the United States is familiar with the story of how Alaska was sold to the Americans for next to nothing. Considerably fewer people have heard about the Russian colony in California. And only historians seem to know that mere chance prevented the future 50th state of the US from becoming a part of the Russian Empire 205 years ago.

The 'Schaffer scam', as those events are known in American historiography, was a fleeting episode of the colonial era. But that doesn’t make the story any less exciting.