(07-23-2022, 11:50 PM)Ccat Wrote: So, what do you all think will happen in the next 5-10 years? Where will Kilauea erupt next, when?
What’s next? Who knows, eh? But, what the heck, I’ll speculate that it’s reasonable to assume that what we see is what we are going to get for awhile. It could be otherwise, and probably will now that I am saying something, after all it’s a living breathing volcano, but if past is prologue...
As it did during the last summit collapse in 1924 Kiliauea drained a considerable amount of magma in the 2018 Lower East Rift eruption and it will take a number of years to reinflate to anywhere near it’s previously level. Meanwhile, heat, gas, and magma are rising to the surface at the summit. This is not an eruption in the sense of magma being pushed out of the system as much as it is more a standing pipe, venting heat and gas through magma circulating in a vertical column. A pressure relief valve as magma accumulates below.
Meanwhile there is no evidence of magma reoccupying the shallower depths of the East Rift Zone. There was some after the summit collapse/east rift event of 2018, but since the pressures accumulating in the volcano’s core established that standing vent to the summit, nothing. Seemingly, the magma accumulated since has not been enough to extend beyond the central part of the volcano, or it is going somewhere undetected, and as such there is little in the way of the accumulated energy that it would take to forge a path to the surface down the rift.
This does not suggest there is
no way for magma to find the Lower East Rift and erupt in short order. The interior of the volcano is hot, in many instances it is plastic rather than ridged, and there are pre-established dikes, paths that may be able to be reoccupied given the right set of circumstances. So, as with all active volcanoes, there is nothing to suggest we relax our vigilance. But hey, that’s the price one pays for our lower property values that make it possible for folks to live here in the first place.
When this summit activity first started I thought it would be episodic. Short eruptions with longer periods of inactivity between. But that assumed, as with other eruptions, a model in which the surface rock is fractured and pushed aside in the onset of activity which in turn rebounds to pinch the initial fissure as the energy driving an eruption wanes. But now, considering the eruption did not break through a solid cap of stone but rather came up in the middle of a pile of rubble (all the shattered rock from the 2018 collapse) I began to appreciate there is far less to absorb and release the energy of an initial dike emplacement. And, as such, there is no energy, no mechanism to pinch off the dike feeding the surface pond. So we wallow in our magmatic slumber, with a pond to dazzle the senses, and light the way as the mountain is reinvigorated.
Looking at the history of eruptions...
https://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/HCV/kil-hist.html
it took 31 years, from 1924 until 1955, before magma found its way to the surface on the lower portion of its eastern rift after the last collapse of Halemaumau. For now the path of least resistance, for the heat, gas, and magma rising within the volcano, is to the summit. Until the fractured column in which they rise is again fused together, it is easier to imagine this will continue rather than otherwise. But again.. she’s dynamic, and while we look for patterns in the past to assure us of the future she certainly is not constrained by them..
