Kilauea erupts in Hawaii with ‘glowing’ glow
Kilauea, the youngest and most active volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, erupted early Wednesday morning, officials said, sending lava fountains skyward before collecting and spreading over the summit.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory detected a glow in the Kilauea summit’s web camera and said the volcano began erupting around 4:44 a.m. local time. Less than an hour later, the lava created a brilliant black-and-orange web across the crater floor. When morning comes, a live stream showed lava bubbling but the surface began to harden.
“The spread across the floor of the crater was just completely glowing,” Ken Hon, the scientist in charge of the observatory, said in an interview. “The fountain and everything is pretty incredible.”
In a statement, the observatory said it would raise Kilauea’s volcano warning level from a warning to a watch, and aviation color code from red to orange “while evaluating this eruption and associated hazards,” adding that “the opening phases of eruptions are dynamic.”
The observatory said volcano activity was limited to Halema’uma’u, the volcano’s main crater, and there were no major threats to infrastructure or human life. Dr. Hon said the only threat was the gas fumes emanating from the volcano. In response, some parts of Hawaii Volcano National Park, including Kilauea, which lie downwind from the eruption, were closed, said Dr. Hon.
The eruption wasn’t just caught on web cameras. A satellite of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration caught the eruption as heat, ash and sulfur dioxide were suddenly released into the atmosphere.
Kilauea first emerged underwater about 280,000 years ago. according to the National Park Serviceand it is considered a fairly typical shield volcano, named for its gentle slopes resembling a shield lying on the ground.
Kilauea is the smaller, younger brother of Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, which began erupting last year for the first time in four decades but stopped in December. There has been “no significant activity” on Mauna Loa in the past month, the observatory said.
Kilauea erupted almost continuously from 1983 to 2018, when it produced the most destructive eruption in its recorded history. Dr. Hon said Kilauea “has been a little relaxed” since the 2018 eruption, when “so much lava was lost from the summit.”
It became active again in 2020, and Wednesday’s summit eruption was Kilauea’s fourth in three years. The first ran from December 2020 to May 2021, the second from September 2021 to December 2022, and the most recent started in January and lasted until early March.
The eruptions started “rather abruptly,” said Dr. Hon, sometimes with just an hour’s notice. But over the past month, Kilauea started sending some clues.
First, the corner of the volcano started to swell “quite dramatically,” said Dr. Hon. Then the earthquake activity started to pick up. But that wasn’t enough to indicate that an eruption was imminent.
Tuesday night the earthquakes intensified and the swelling increased. Around 3:30 a.m., the observatory recorded a magnitude 3.5 quake and “then a rapid fire” of low- and high-frequency earthquakes, said Dr. the surface.
In the years following the 2018 eruption, the volcano had to be “pumped back up,” he said, adding that “the first place that happens is at the top.”
Dr. Hon said it was too early to say how long this eruption would last, but because there was “a good four months” of lava storage, “the system could continue to run for quite some time.”