Curtains of Fire:
Hawaii’s Mauna Loa and Kilauea Volcanoes
There are eight major Hawaiian Islands. Most people live on Oahu, where the port city of Honolulu has served as capital, first of the islands and then of the territory and state, since 1845.
Here’s some good news for everyone there: Oahu’s volcanic features are very old — another eruption is not likely.
Maui, southeast of Oahu and the island of Molokai, has Haleakala, which last erupted in 1801.
A little farther to the southeast is Hawaii, the US state’s namesake, also known as the Big Island.
As we would expect on an island closest to the mantle hotspot that has built the Hawaiian Islands, the Big Island has most of the volcanoes — five, in fact.
We’ve all heard about eruptions on the Big Island recently, with Mauna Loa going off in 2022 and Kilauea — one of the planet’s most active volcanoes — erupting more or less constantly from late 2020 to 2023 as well as making major headlines in 2018-2019 with a rampage through the Puna District that displaced thousands of people and caused many hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damages and lost tourism income.
No lives were lost, but Kilauea’s 2018-2019 eruption was a terrible experience for everyone involved.
As for the other three Big Island volcanoes, Hualalai last erupted in 1801; Mauna Kea last erupted four to six thousand years ago; and Kohala is extinct.
Although it isn’t erupting just now, Kilauea is having ongoing summit earthquake swarms. These tell experts at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory that magma is on the move inside that huge edifice. (Here is their February 9, 2024, information statement on that.)
Before long, Kilauea will once again light up the Big Island’s night sky.
Mauna Loa is an even larger and older fire mountain, but Kilauea is our main focus in this episode because its frequent activity has earned it the role of type location for what many volcanologists call “Hawaiian eruptions.”
Basically, if a geoscientist anywhere in the world says that a local volcano had a Hawaiian eruption — some prefer to call these “Icelandic eruptions” for reasons mentioned in the last episode — their colleagues know that the ground cracked open and a row of fire fountains erupted, feeding vast streams of runny lava (red-orange at night and silvery gray when the sun’s up because of how the chilled outer crust reflects daylight).
That’s what Kilauea does, over and over again.
How do lava fountains work?
Such activity depends on physics and chemistry, not on any unique factor from the Hawaiian (or Icelandic) hotspot.
There’s no consensus yet on the underground mechanics of lava fountains, but in general, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), they occur when lots of volcanic gas can’t escape quickly enough as basaltic magma rises to the surface, resulting in a magma-gas jet at the vent.
In Hawaiian eruptions, a long row of relatively small (30 to 60 foot) fountains erupts. Most of these then die out in a day or so, leaving one central vent whose fountains get taller and taller, building a spatter rampart.
Fissure 8, for instance, ended up ruling Kilauea’s 2018-2019 eruption.
Eventually the lava fountain decreases and the eruption peters out, leaving behind a line of small spatter cones and that dominant rampart (the Fissure 8 landmark was named Ahu’aila’au in 2021).
So much for technical details.
Now let’s have Kilauea show us the curtains of fire that brand an eruption “Hawaiian,” using an example that you might not know about because it happened more than sixty years ago.
It was spectacular as well as destructive. It set a record, too, producing the tallest lava fountain (1,900 feet) ever recorded in Hawaii!
Kilauea, 1959-1960
That is a fine half-hour video to watch on a quiet morning, if you feel like checking it out.
If not, it’s a film put together by the USGS and the National Park Service (NPS) to show highlights of the Kilauea Iki/Puna eruption that started in mid-November 1959.
It began with lava fountains at the summit in a mile-long side pit called Kilauea Iki. After a three-week pause over the holidays, which was thoughtful of the volcano goddess Pele, the eruption resumed at a new venue in mid-January, almost thirty miles away — down in the Puna District near Kilauea’s Lower East Rift Zone (just like in 2018, but with more areas affected and with many more fire curtains).
By the time this eruption ended on February 19, 1960, lava covered more than 4 square miles of lower Puna’s fields, towns, roads, and forests.
In addition, the Big Island was almost 1 square mile larger, thanks to the new lava delta Kilauea had constructed just off the Puna coast.
There are lava fountains galore in the film, and for once, a Sixties-era dramatic soundtrack matches what we see onscreen — for starters, almost one full minute of fire curtains pouring into a lava lake as the opening credits roll and the symphonic horn section approaches supersonic range.
After a brief graphic about Kilauea’s structure, the film goes on to show various highlights of both 1959-1960 eruption stages — for a more up-to-date view of Kilauea’s “plumbing,” the USGS has this simplified graphic online (on that page you can click “back” for their description).
The first eruption stage unfolds in the Kilauea Iki pit crater just east of the volcano’s summit caldera, where ten fissures, located on a ledge about halfway up the crater wall, unleash fire curtains that are almost a hundred feet high.
All of this is part of the national park, so nobody is in harm’s way, although many hiking trails and almost all of the forest are goners.
The USGS-NPS films dwells lovingly on the long streams of lava that pour down and soon fill the crater with a fiery lake of lava, hundreds of feet deep.
There are rapids, just as though lava was water; lava falls; and once the lake is established, the constant turbulence from that one remaining fountain — now topping out at around 700 feet — creates ocean-like waves and even lava “surf.”
The camera also catches close-ups of the lake bubbling just before a fountain appears. The lava then flows back down the vent after fountaining subsides, sometimes forming the sort of whirlpool you see in a draining bathtub!
Powerful as the 2018-2019 eruption was, Kilauea did not then put on as mighty a display as it does in this Kilauea Iki eruption video!
In the film we also see volcanologists going up close to the spatter rampart to collect samples (which since have proven to be highly valuable, giving scientists more “insider details” on exactly how Kilauea eruptions work).
We see spectators enjoying the view from a safe distance, and there is even video from the old Hawaiian Volcano Observatory building that was damaged beyond repair by earthquakes and caldera subsidence in 2018-2019.
The Kilauea Iki lava fountains grow taller and taller, with one reaching 1,900 feet in just 12 seconds, per the USGS. (They were ready to close the nearby park when that happened, but the activity didn’t escalate further.)
During pauses in the fountaining, film makers get views of the lava-spattered remains of a forest and highway near Kilauea Iki.
The USGS pronounced the summit eruption over in late January 1960. There were still huge volumes of magma inside the fire mountain, though, and our film shows a graphic on how this underground molten rock travelled down Kilauea’s East Rift to start the second stage of the eruption on January 13, 1960, when a line of fire fountains opened up near the town of Kapoho.
After this, the scenes shown are basically old-timey versions of what we watched happen live in Puna during the 2018-2019 eruption, but with many more lava fountains and a broader flow field.
There were fewer people, fewer housing developments, and more farm land in 1960, but everyone still had to get out of the way when Madam Pele came calling.
She stayed until February 5th and she left behind a changed landscape (a little of it shown on the USGS-NPS film).
That’s Kilauea.
We certainly can’t leave Hawaii without a look, however briefly, at the volcano that makes up a little over half of the Big Island.
Mauna Loa, 1935-ish
This is a Decade Volcano, and I have covered it in detail in “The Decade Volcanoes and Us” eBook, available on Amazon.
That HVO link below leads to plenty of information on Mauna Loa as well as on Hawaii’s other volcanoes, along with webcams, data, and the latest activity updates.
Let’s just close this episode with one “curtains of fire” video from Mauna Loa. (Of course, there are plenty of others online.)
It’s a doozy, though you might not think it’s impressive on first glance.
Here are three reasons why it is absolutely amazing:
- The USGS calls it possibly the first color film of an eruption. The silvery “day” color of flowing lava contrasts nicely with the red fountains. Mauna Loa is following the rules here and opening its eruption with a lava curtain.
- Mid-1930s airplanes had moved beyond the biplane stage a bit, but that is an open cockpit and he is filming at an altitude over 15,000 feet — in winter. See the snow patches on that caldera rim?
- The USGS video note indicates that this was probably filmed in late 1935. If so, it was the start of an eruption that later would open some flank vents and threaten Hilo — this is the eruption that General George Patton bombed! (The eruption coincidentally ended after that, but authorities claimed success; nowadays, no one bombs erupting volcanoes.)
Take a deep breath, bundle up for your open-cockpit flight, and enjoy:
The video shows a line of fire mountains stretching about two thousand along the bottom of the huge caldera at Mauna Leoa’s summit.
According to the USGS, the caldera floor is about 13,100 feet above sea level and the fountains are hundreds of feet tall.
Here are more details about Mauna Loa’s 1935 eruption (and the bombing).
Monitoring:
More information:
Global Volcanism Program:
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Sources include:
In addition to multiple sources among those listed for the Mauna Loa chapter of “The Decade Volcanoes and Us”:
GEOL205 lecture notes. n.d. Kilauea eruptive history. https://hilo.hawaii.edu/~kenhon/GEOL205/kilauea/default.htm
LaJeunesse, S. 2018. Eruption — Hawaii Sea Grant. https://seagrant.soest.hawaii.edu/eruption/
MacDonald, G. A. 1962. The 1959 and 1960 eruptions of Kilauea volcano, Hawaii, and the construction of walls to restrict the spread of the lava flows. Bulletin Volcanologique, 24: 249-294.
Pietruszka, A. J.; Marske, J. P.; Heaton, D. E.; Garcia, M. O.; and Rhodes, J. M. 2018. An isotopic perspective into the magmatic evolution and architecture of the rift zones of Kīlauea Volcano. Journal of Petrology, 59(12): 2311-2352.
Scott, S.; Pfeffer, M.; Oppenheimer, C.; Bali, E.; and others. 2023. Near-surface magma flow instability drives cyclic lava fountaining at Fagradalsfjall, Iceland. Nature Communications, 14(1): 6810.
Stovall, W. K.; Houghton, B. F.; Gonnermann, H.; Fagents, S. A.; and Swanson, D. A. 2011. Eruption dynamics of Hawaiian-style fountains: the case study of episode 1 of the Kīlauea Iki 1959 eruption. Bulletin of Volcanology, 73: 511-529.
US Geological Survey. 2007. Volcano Watch: A closer look at lava fountains. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/news/volcano-watch-a-closer-look-lava-fountains
___. 2022. Volcano Watch: The 2018 eruption of Kilaues was big on a global scale. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/news/volcano-watch-2018-eruption-kilauea-was-big-global-scale
___. 2023. Geology and history of Mauna Loa. https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mauna-loa/science/geology-and-history-mauna-loa
University of Hawaii. n.d. Volcanic eruptions on Oahu. https://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/ASK/oahu-eruptions.html
Volcano Cafe. 2018. Kilaues: The Lower Puna eruption of 1955. https://www.volcanocafe.org/kilauea-the-lower-puna-eruption-of-1955/
Flight To Wonder 