Kilauea Continues to Erupt
- Written by:
- Joshua Stevens and
- Adam P. Voiland
- Technical support:
- Amy Moran
- View full credits
Large hot spots associated with active fissures were detected northeast of Leilani Estates. The lava was flowing from fissure 17, one of the most active of the 20 new fissures that have emerged. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) reported that fissure 17 produced lava fountains and spatter explosions that rose more than 30 meters (100 feet) into the air on May 14. Slow-moving lava from that fissure had moved east-southeast and traveled roughly one mile.
One of the notable things about this image is what is not visible. Normally, a strong thermal signal stands out at Pu’u ’O’o, a vent located roughly halfway between the summit and Leilani Estates. In what has proven to be the longest and most voluminous known outpouring from Kilauea’s East Rift Zone in more than 500 years, lava has regularly overflowed from a lava lake in that vent, or from nearby fissures, since 1983. On April 30, 2018, activity at Pu’u ’O’o subsided as the lake drained, and lava moved eastward toward Leilani Estates.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Data visualizer
- Joshua Stevens (SSAI) [Lead]
Writer
- Adam P. Voiland (SSAI) [Lead]
Technical support
- Amy Moran (GST) [Lead]
Datasets used in this visualization
Landsat-8 True Color (A.K.A. Band Combination 2,3,4) (Collected with the OLI sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.