Hello all. I (Wes) am guest blogging. My advise to you is to pay attention to the pictures and less to the text. It won't be as elegant as Jenni's usual prose.
So here we go. Show up Saturday in Hawaii to hear that Madam Pele has a welcoming party planned. The first thing that happened at the eruption site was a catastrophic collapse of the Pu'u O'o crater. Below is a picture of the steaming pit. Those cracks in the foreground are fresh...don't get too close!
There is a spectacular video on the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory website detailing the collapse at
Activity at this site has been vigorous over the past several weeks with several lava flows (as seen in the beginning of the video). The floor of the crater has actually risen around 200 m (600 ft) recently!
What followed was what is called a fissure eruption, which is where a crack in the ground opens up, and pressurized magma comes shooting out. Fissure eruption can be quite common at basaltic volcanoes in Iceland, Italy and elsewhere.
For some perspective, the photo below shows Pu'u O'o crater in the background with steam in the foreground. The steam was the site of the first part of the fissure eruption which occurred after the collapse of Pu'u O'o. At the time of the photo, no fresh lava was coming out of the ground at the site of the steaming.
The photo below shows the site of spattering when I made it out to the eruption. What you are looking at is two spattering sources, the leftmost spattering source is within a deeper lava lake, and lava is then flowing out of the pond to the middle and right of the picture.
Here's a closeup of the lava lake and flow.
And here's a look at the spattering sources and lava lake from the ground. The trees on the right are about 80 ft high by my estimate.
Below are some random spattering shots for good measure.
The day after these pictures were taken, the eruption stopped. Currently the eruption is "pau" or all done. For the first time in a long time, there is no exposed magma at Kilauea. Weird.
