10-11-2018, 05:54 AM
For a while after Puu Leilani shut down it was hard to discern just what was happening instrumentally. Things remained pretty flat, as if there is a very broad area that might be slowly inflating or deflating but it is so broad as to render any small movement of magma insignificant when looked at through the eyes of the instrumentation on the volcano's surface. More recently a familiar pattern began to emerge where the summit appears to be once again deflating while the area around Puu Oo is inflating. You can see this here:
https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vsc/captures/..._month.png
Where one month of deformation at the two stations shows they both became active around September 18 or 19th and have continued, one going up and the other down at about the same rate, ever since. Note that the daily cycle, those little ups and downs that appear regularly each day on the plot, is the Earth warming and cooling. And now, in the last few days, it appears they may be slowing down.
The odd thing is that a tilt station further east, between Oo and Leilani, is not sympathetic to Puu Oo but rather continues to show deflation. This might suggest there is a blockage preventing magma from getting into the lower reaches of the rift, but with so few data points, and the fact that we've only seen about 8 microradians of change overall, I've felt we have a while before any of this will amount to something that would trigger another eruptive event. But yes, the mountain is showing some, albeit small, signs of reawakening.
https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vsc/captures/..._month.png
Where one month of deformation at the two stations shows they both became active around September 18 or 19th and have continued, one going up and the other down at about the same rate, ever since. Note that the daily cycle, those little ups and downs that appear regularly each day on the plot, is the Earth warming and cooling. And now, in the last few days, it appears they may be slowing down.
The odd thing is that a tilt station further east, between Oo and Leilani, is not sympathetic to Puu Oo but rather continues to show deflation. This might suggest there is a blockage preventing magma from getting into the lower reaches of the rift, but with so few data points, and the fact that we've only seen about 8 microradians of change overall, I've felt we have a while before any of this will amount to something that would trigger another eruptive event. But yes, the mountain is showing some, albeit small, signs of reawakening.