Understanding all the messiness that is our universe takes time, energy, and peer review. This last bit means that results from amazing events sometimes take a bit of time to make it from a researcher’s computer and out into a research journal. 

For the researchers who studied the 2018 Kīlauea eruption, their time has come. This was the eruption that ate a few suburbs and erupted through a variety of new fissures that emerged in places like the middles of yards. Throughout this event, which drained the volcano’s famous lake, researchers measured the volcano’s shape in amazing detail, catching both the puffing out and settling in areas where lava built up and where lava drained, all while measuring every tremor’s location and strength. 

In a series of papers, researchers have now shown how the different parts of the volcano’s plumbing are and aren’t connected. The results themselves are cool to dig through, but the bottom line is, the destruction of 2018 revealed which planetary pipes can smite subdivisions when they get full and which will merely fill a pretty lava lake; and next time, when there is a next time because with this volcano there will be, next time we should be able to do better predicting where to worry about lava. And may that place be in the lava park and not in a subdivision.

More Information

Volcanic Tremor and Deformation at Kīlauea (Eos)

“Post-2018 Caldera Collapse Re-Inflation Uniquely Constrains Kīlauea’s Magmatic System,” Taiyi Wang, Yujie Zheng, Fabio Pulvirenti, and Paul Segall, 2021 May 19, JGR Solid Earth

“Sources of Volcanic Tremor Associated With the Summit Caldera Collapse During the 2018 East Rift Eruption of Kīlauea Volcano, Hawai’i,” Jean Soubestre, Bernard Chouet, and Phillip Dawson, 2021 May 21, JGR Solid Earth