Kīlauea, one of the world's most active volcanoes, erupted for 12 hours on Monday in an area that last erupted a half-century ago, the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said. The eruption began about 1 mile south of the volcano's caldera.
Coincidentally, a new study just came out that could potentially shed light on how the volcano erupts — with an eye toward better forecasting in the future.
Stanford University postdoctoral researcher Josh Crozier studied the 2018 Kīlauea eruptions and found that they didn't follow the normal rules for volcanoes.
He proposed a new mechanism to explain the eruptions. Think of a child's stomp rocket toy — stepping on a platform causes a hollow rocket to shoot up into the air.
"Each earthquake is a caldera collapse event where a huge sector of rock above the magma reservoir is kind of suddenly dropping downward, pressurizing a pocket of accumulated gas and debris, and then directly pushing up that gas and debris to make an eruption plume without really fresh magma or groundwater being directly involved," Crozier said.
"This 2018 eruption at Kīlauea was really the first time this mechanism has been identified and studied. And so we don't really know how widespread it might be. But there are reasons to expect that it's probably not a completely unique thing," Crozier added.
Crozier clarified that the Kīlauea eruption on Monday was not due to a stomp-rocket mechanism and instead looked more like a classic magmatic fissure eruption.
The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory has webcams of Kīlauea.
This interview aired on The Conversation on June 3, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
