eruption 2020

[kalianna]

in the crater?  Look at Hawaii Tracker.  They're live. 

ETA update:  it appears the lava lake is quickly evaporating.  Whew.

[alaskyn66]

https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/k...st-rim-new

Should be an interesting night.

[SBH]

Wow, is this at the lava lake at Halemaumau because lava should have caused an explosion meeting that crater lake? Did this start right after the 4.4 earthquake?

[alaskyn66]

Looking at the earthquake map, there were quite alot of smaller quakes at the summit prior to the big one. So it could have been breaking the surface before that.

[TomK]

A bright glow due to lava was seen a little more than an hour before the 4.4-mag earthquake, so think the eruption likely started before the earthquake.

[leilanidude]

Wow, is this at the lava lake at Halemaumau because lava should have caused an explosion meeting that crater lake? Did this start right after the 4.4 earthquake?

While that is what the armchair folks were claiming, they should have noted that Green Lake was met with massive amounts of lava and did not cause an explosion. I felt there was no reason for something like this to be any different.

The earthquake happened after the lava appeared, by about an hour.

[SBH]

There were many sources saying there could be an explosion if lava met the lake, not “armchair folks”.

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2019/12/0...200-years/

“Hawaii County Civil Defense officials and USGS are keeping close tabs on the steaming lake because magma and water can be an explosive mix at Kilauea.”

I thought about Green Lake last night while trying to go to sleep after seeing the web cams.

[leilanidude]

Good point - but our Civil Defense, has erred so many times to the extreme side of caution, they can't be believed anymore. You would have thought that after seeing Green Lake go up in steam, they might have learned. Green Lake was much larger as well as the flow that ran over it.

[SBH]

“Until we have a better understanding of where the water is coming from, it’s difficult to forecast what could happen next,” Janet Babb, a geologist with the Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, wrote in an email.

Babb does not believe that anything unusual will happen in the next weeks or months, but she says it’s likely that lava will return to Halema’uma’u. Lava could enter the crater to form another lava lake, or it could react violently with the water and create explosions if the lava rapidly rises through the water.

“Water plus heat (from magma/lava) makes steam, and steam can expand tremendously, which can break up lava into small bits and hurl them into the air,” Babb wrote.”


https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/06/us/hawaii...index.html

[dobanion]

Green Lake was "flooded" with lava from above, and boiled off in the open, much like leaving a pot of water on the stove on HIGH until all the water was gone.

The theory was that under the crater lake, was more water, trapped in the rock. This was the stuff that was supposed to go BOOM as lava rose to meet it. But, didn't happen.

After seeing the replays of the initial stages of the eruption, it certainly was a unexpected start. The vent opened up just adjacent to, but NOT under, the crater lake. As a result the crater lake boiled off in ~40 minutes in the same manner as Green Lake. Being saturated with dissolved gas and acids, I'd wager some folks in Kau woke up this morning thinking "WTF is that smell?"

Looking like we have a lava lake folks. Potentially a big one, if the vents keep going. Unlike pre-2018, it's not down a steep hole, so crater rim viewers can get a real nice view. Who's heading up tonight?