Summit Inflation, Explosive Events: It's Been a Good Week

Last Sunday was marked by an unusual peak of inflation at the Halema`uma`u vent that caused the lava lake level to rise to the point where it was spattering out of the little pukas on the vent floor. The vent floor is about 85 meters below the Kilauea caldera floor, and the surface of the lava (the surface where the gas is released) is about 200 meters below that. So, for scale, the glowing red holes that you see in the picture below are each about 10 meters across, or the size of a city bus (according to my poor estimation skills).

Matt P. took Fred and I out to see the lava (not all of the volunteers could go for safety reasons), so I've posted a picture and I also took a pixelated video from my camera. All photos and video are property of USGS. A much better video is Matt P.'s zoom-in video, where you can see the lava spattering up through the holes. I've posted the link to the right of this entry under the Interesting Links section. Pretty cool, right? Apparently the lava lake level in June was about this high, although the hole was much bigger so you could see the lake sloshing around a lot more.

While we were there we heard a rockfall that lasted about 15 seconds (it seems even longer when you're standing right there) and the red glow intensified, but apparently it was still a pretty small rockfall in comparison to other events.

Speaking of other events, there was a hybrid/VLP event on September 17 at 3:13 am, meaning that there was a large collapse onto the lava surface that caused an explosive event. There's a video posted on the HVO website from the high resolution low-light camera in the HVO tower, but I've posted it here for your convenience:



This event was about 1/5 the size of the October 12, 2008 explosive event that happened during the day where you could see lava above the vent floor level.

In my humble opinion, it's been a very exciting week.