Kilauea, one of the world's most active volcanic masses, stands tall on Hawaii’s Big Island. Just this Monday, lava and volcanic gas were spotted emerging from inside it, though The Guardian has reported that all of it was contained within the volcano’s summit caldera, located within Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
Kilauea is located in the southeast of Hawaii and is one of the primary features of the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. As reported by Britannica,
The name roughly translates to “Much Spreading” in Hawaiian, and "is an elongated dome built of lava eruptions from a central crater and from lines of craters extending along east and southwest rifts, or fissures.
What we know about Kilauea and its volcanic activity
Per The Guardian and CNN, the volcano began displaying a surge in earthquake activity at around 2.20 am local time after a three-month hiatus. Within 30 minutes, webcam images show bright orange lava gushing forth from the volcano, spurting as high as 300 feet, the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The
USGS has also uploaded a live stream of the event on YouTube, which you can watch here:
Per CNN, at 5.30 am, 500 acres of the caldera floor were covered with red-hot lava. In the live stream, the hot molten rock can be seen spurting, leaving behind massive amounts of volcanic gas and ash. As reported by The Guardian, these fountains soared as high as 80m (260ft) by the early hours of Monday.
“The lava is coming out at a very rapid rate as it usually does at the onset of these eruptions,” said Ken Hon, the leading scientist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. During the livestream, he went on, "It’s a pretty exciting time … This is a really big voluminous eruption. It was a fairly rapid onset for one of these eruptions. This is the fifth eruption that we’ve had in the summit area of Kilauea since December of 2020."
By 3.00 and 4.00 pm, however, volcanic activity saw a significant decline. By 5.00 pm, CNN revealed that only a little over one square mile around the volcano was blanketed in lava. Per an official release from the USGS,
"The lava is estimated to be about 1 yard (1 meter) thick, giving an estimated average effusion rate of 110 cubic yards per second (85 cubic meters per second) for the first 8 hours of the eruption."
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The official USGS website has revealed that Kilauea and its volcanic activity are being closely monitored, and an eruption update is expected to come out tomorrow morning, provided there are no major developments through the night.
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