Becky suggested I post some additional images from our trips to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Most of these have been with Austin College students in our course on Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands. We took them hiking in places that are currently closed to the public because of the eruption and associated earthquakes. For instance, you can no longer hike to Halema’uma’u, the fire pit, which in Hawaiian tradition is the home of Pele, the goddess of the volcanoes:
You also cannot hike the Halema’uma’u trail to the spatter rampart about ½ mile north of the fire pit, where you find signs warning of danger:
The danger is not falling into molten lava, but breaking through a “skylight,” which is a dome of solidified lava with an opening below it – these are dangerous - you can break a leg or get seriously lacerated.
The current eruption, which actually began in 1983, mostly came from a vent in the east rift zone of Kilauea called Pu’u O’o. Pu’u O’o and neighboring vents have a complex eruptive history. Until the recent eruption began in the Leilani Estates area, lava from Pu’u O’o tended to run downhill toward the ocean through lava tubes, so you tend to only see a plume of volcanic steam erupting from the vent. This volcanic stream is rich with sulfur dioxide, which combines with water (in the air, in your lungs) to form H2SO4 (sulfuric acid). It is dangerous to breath the “vog” that is produced by Hawaiian volcanoes. Here is a view of Pu’u O’o from Pu’u Huluhulu:
The current eruption in the east rift zone is not the first destructive eruption form Kilauea. The Pu’u O’o eruption mostly obliterated the community of Kalapana in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This eruption also covered the coastal highway that led into the southeast part of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park:
The end of the Chain of Craters Road is a place where one can occasionally see active pahoehoe flows. I have seen them from a safe distance, but I haven’t been able to get close enough to one to play with the lava with a stick:
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