Eruption of the Kilauea Vulcano on Hawai

**kellyhound** · #1 ● 08-24-2025, 03:10 AM

Episode 31 of Kilauea’s ongoing eruption ended at 2:52 a.m. Saturday after 12.6 hours of fountaining from the north vent.

Scientists said the fountains had been coming out from the north vent at a 30-degree angle and, at its peak, extended 300 meters or 1,000 feet.

Ken Hon, scientist-in-charge at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, explained the sideways lava fountain.

“If you remember, episodes 29 and 30 lost the ability to go to the really high fountains,” Hon said.

“There were only somewhere between 100 and 300 feet high, that’s because after episode 28, the vent kind of slumped, and part of the cone slumped into the vent, and it changed the configuration.”

Scientists said the Kilauea Iki (1959) and Maunaulu eruptions (1969) featured similar episodes. Both cases were caused by temporary obstructions within the eruptive vents, usually a collapsed part of the vent or the surrounding cone.

Despite the angle, Hon said there won’t be any impact on the crater.

“It’s not going to have any real impact on the crater. We do know that the weight, because there’s been more lava put on the west side than the east side, the weight at times has kind of tipped the surface of the crater a little bit and allowed older (lava) to leak out of the crater,” he said.

“We’ve got five years of lava down there that’s filling that hole that’s over a thousand feet deep underneath all of that,” Hon said.

“So that what looks like solid rock is sitting on a very thick bunch of liquid, and we know from looking at Kilauea Iki when interrupted in 1959 that it didn’t actually solidify all the way through until about 35 to 40 years after that.”

One video is of a former eruption.

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