Images

Just before 10:00 a.m. today (Monday, April 30), a break in the weather allowed HVO's webcam to capture this image of the lava lake within Halema‘uma‘u at the summit of Kīlauea. Following multiple overflows of the lava lake last week, the lake level dropped over the weekend in concert with the switch to summit deflation.

Vigorous overflows from Kīlauea's summit lava lake covered a large portion of the floor of Halema‘uma‘u this morning. In this video, the view starts from the north and heads south, showing the north and east sides of Halema‘uma‘u crater.

Night view of Kīlauea Volcano's summit lava lake from April 24, 2018, while lava from the lake overflow was spreading westward (to the right in the picture) from the Overlook Vent. USGS photo from the Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park Jaggar Overlook by M. Patrick.

Beginning around midnight on Saturday, April 21, Kīlauea Volcano's summit lava lake rose high enough that lava briefly spilled onto the floor of Halema‘uma‘u. Since then, additional overflows occurred in four pulses on April 22-23. The largest one occurred during the fourth pulse, which started at 6:30 a.m.

Overflows from the perched lava pond within west pit, a small crater adjacent to the main Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō crater on Kīlauea Volcano's East Rift Zone, continue to build up the levees around the pond. The rising level of the perched lava pond during the past month is a sign of the increasing pressure within the magma system beneath Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō.

A brief break in the rain allowed for some clear views of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō on Kīlauea Volcano's East Rift Zone. Since mid-March, Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō tiltmeters have been recording inflation, and uplift of the crater floor is visible in HVO webcams.

An HVO geologist observes the perched lava pond within the west pit of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō.

This time-lapse image sequence taken by a time-lapse camera on the rim of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō's west pit, spans March 20 to April 18. The sequence, of approximately one image per day, shows the growth of the lava pond within the west pit as it developed into a perched lava pond. This sequence is looped 4 times.

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Summit deflation began this morning, and the lake level has dropped slightly. This morning the lake was about 14 m (46 ft) below the Overlook crater rim, having dropped roughly 4 m (13 ft) since yesterday morning. In this photo, an HVO geologist checks on a time-lapse camera on the rim of Halema‘uma‘u Crater.

Over the past month, HVO monitoring instruments have recorded a sharp inflationary trend at Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō (see https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/monitoring_deformation.html, scroll to bottom of page).

Over the past few days, Kīlauea Volcano's summit lava lake in Halema‘uma‘u has steadily risen as summit inflation continues. Today, Sunday, April 15, the lake surface was just 14 m (46 ft) below the Overlook crater rim. Spattering has also been active, with this photo showing a large spattering site in the southeast portion of the lake.

This light gray block of rock (backpack for scale) is part of the approximately 830-year-old explosion deposit on the northwest rim of Moku‘āweoweo, the summit caldera of Mauna Loa. USGS photo by F.A. Trusdell.

This satellite image was captured on Thursday, April 12, by the Landsat 8 satellite. Although this is a false-color image, the color map has been chosen to mimic what the human eye would expect to see. Bright red pixels depict areas of high temperatures and show active lava. White areas are clouds.

Most of the lava flow (dark black) produced by the April 1868 Mauna Loa eruption can be seen in this aerial photo on the west (left) side of the prominent fault scarp, known informally as the Kahuku pali (formal names are Pali o Mamalu for the upper half and Pali‘okūlani for the lower half of the scarp).

Video: Clear skies and sunshine provided a spectacular view of Kīlauea Volcano's summit lava lake this morning. Spattering on the north side and center of the lake surface—a departure from its more common location on the southeast side of the lake—occasionally happens when the surface flow direction reverses.

Destruction caused by the 1868 great Ka'ū earthquake included the Wai'ōhinu church, shown here, in the Ka'ū District of Hawaiʻi Island. With a magnitude estimated at 7.9, the earthquake is the largest in Hawaii's recorded history. Photo by Henry L. Chase, published in "Volcanoes of Kīlauea and Mauna Loa on the Island of Hawaiʻi" by W.T.

[Left] This cross-section through the south part of the Island of Hawai'i illustrates the hypocenter of the 1868 great Kaʻū earthquake (red star), located on the décollement (bold black line) between Mauna Loa (brown) and the ancient ocean floor (tan). Earth's lithospheric mantle and the ocean are represented in green and blue, respectively.

On March 25, between 10:06 and 10:08 p.m., a small lava flow began erupting onto the Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō crater floor for the first time since May 2016. In this thermal image, taken by the PTcam today (March 26) at 1:18 p.m., the flow (bright color) appears to be supplied by one of the small spatter cones in the crater's south embayment.

A volcano-monitoring station "health monitor" developed by CJ Moniz at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO). It consists of three programmable circuit boards (bottom row), voltage sensors (top row), a current sensor (top right corner), and a custom-made voltage sensor for a 48VDC system (tan circuit board on the bottom right).

Dr. Nial Peters from the University of Cambridge sets up the prototype radar on the rim of Halema‘uma‘u at the summit of Kīlauea in January 2018. Microwave pulses are transmitted from one dish towards the lava lake surface. Some of the microwave energy is reflected back and is received by the other dish.