Kilauea Eruption 12/23/24

[MyManao]

a useful chart..

Interesting chart. And yeah the big boys.. with a tidbit.. 

Back in the days of Puu Oo's episodic high fountain phases there were some remarkable moments that didn't make it into the record. The initial plan was that the first 20 phases were published in Ed Wolfe's The Puu Oo eruption of Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii: Episodes 1 through 20, January 3, 1983, through June 8, 1984, and that was to be followed by George Ulrich's phases 21 through the end, which was phase 47. But unlike Ed, who's stint at monitoring the early phases of Puu Oo's fountains was followed by further works and as such he was motivated to put his research out at Puu Oo to bed.. ie clear his desk of the old so as to make more new.. George retired at the end of his stint at HVO and wasn't all that motivated to go through the grind of publishing all the work done during his tenure. As such much of the nuances of the later stages of high fountaining out at Oo have fallen through the cracks.

One such tidbit is that starting at phase 42 the eruptions, which on average lasted 12 hours of continuous fountains reaching 1000 feet and more, ended with what we came to call jetting events. In an event as such the fountaining lava would become gas depleted, and instead of fountaining a spray of individual pieces of tephra it would appear to be a 150 foot wide solid stream of lava with a boiling dome at its top, standing over 2000' above the eruptive surface, followed by a phase of extremely gas rich and melt poor jetting. As if all the gas from the depleted lava was separated out and then erupted itself. The first time this happened we were just stunned. But after that we kept a theodolite set up at our base camp and were ready to measure them if they happened again. Overall we recorded about a dozen. At the end of phase 47 alone we witnessed three separate events spanning the last half hour of the eruption. And measured each at over 2000 feet above the vent.

HVO, who recorded eruptions using Kodachrome film on time lapse super 8 motion picture cameras with a still shot taken every 30 seconds during activity still has, if those reels still exists, the evidence in it's raw form, and in George's notes. But George, who did try, never finished for publication a final draft of his work. So, in later publications.. HVO picked up the narrative with their The First Two Decades of the Pu‘u ‘Ö‘ö-Küpaianaha Eruption and went on from there, without ever capturing all the nuances of the later phases of Puu Oo's high fountains.