VIDEO: UH expert provides insights on Kīlauea’s towering lava fountains

Lava fountaining at Kīlauea on May 25. Credit: USGS

Lava flows cover portions of Halemaʻumaʻu. Credit: USGS

USGS geologists at Kīlauea summit. Credit: USGS

Link to sound and file video (details below): https://go.hawaii.edu/a58

SOUNDBITES:

Steven Lundblad/Geology professor, UH Hilo 

(17 seconds)

My name is Steven Lundblad, I’m a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo in the Geology department. 

Why on and off eruptions have continued since December 2024

(1 minute, 6 seconds)

Kīlauea started erupting right before Christmas time 2024. And as of the other day we’ve had 21 episodes of fountaining associated with that eruption. So what tends to happen is the pressure builds up below the summit of Kīlauea because there isn’t an outlet. At some point the magma makes it to the surface and since it has a fair amount of trapped gas in it. It is erupted out in a fairly explosive manner. We’ve had fountains up to 1,000 feet high during some of the episodes. After that gas is kind of released and some of the pressure is released then the lava comes out and tends to cap over the top and that cycle restarts. So we’re kind of in this repeatable pattern where about once a week we have an eruptive cycle and then in between there’s enough of a kind of a cap on that magma chamber to kind of start that pressure building again.

What leads to an eruption?

(40 seconds)

In these eruptions there are a whole host of different types of effects and parameters that we measure to both predict a little bit when the eruption might occur but also can then tell us a story about what happened during the eruption. Currently, the best indicator of what’s happening with the eruption and whether or not it’s going to erupt is the ground tilt and that’s essentially measuring the deformation of the ground surface. You can think of it like a balloon where as the pressure increases the surface moves up and expands.

(24 seconds)

You can kind of imagine the ground tilt being related to blowing up a balloon where when the pressure is building the ground surface moves up and away from the summit and causes the ground to be higher in some places than it would be otherwise. What seems to happen is when it reaches a certain level of tilt then we get an eruption and the cycle starts over.

(18 seconds)

The ground deformation graphs at this point show kind of a sawtooth pattern where the ground tilt increases over the course of a week or so. The eruption happens, it drops and then immediately it starts to rebuild that tilt or the ground deformation again.

How UH Hilo scientists work on forecasting future eruptions 

(46 seconds)

One of the other things we do after the eruption or during the eruptions maybe a better way to put it is collect samples and the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory scientists do this. What we do here at UH Hilo is help them by looking at the chemical composition of the material that comes out to see how the eruption is evolving over time. And so that’s a little bit of a way to predict the longer-term processes that might be going on for future eruptions whether within this eruption cycle or down the road and how they compared to last month, last year, five years ago, 10 years ago and what might be changing at the volcano.

(48 seconds)

The current eruption is an interesting one. It follows a similar pattern to some of the longer live eruptions at Kīlauea. So when Puʻu ʻŌ’ō started erupting in 1983 and it erupted for 35 years—the first initial phases of that eruption had many high fountaining episodes before it kind of settled down into a pattern where it was lava flows coming out and then running down to the ocean and many people are familiar with that because it was a great place to go look at lava. Same thing happened in 1959 at Kīlauea Iki. That eruption occurred for about a month or so and it was punctuated by a whole series of high fountaining events with this. And then in 1969 at Mauna Ulu, again the early phases of that eruption had kind of this episodic high fountaining event. So it’s possible that the volcano will continue to erupt at the summit for a long period of time. And maybe we won’t see the similar type of high fountaining but we may just continually have lava flows building up the lava lake that exist there.

B-ROLL

File: Analyzing lava samples in UH Hilo lab