Hawaii's Kilauea volcano eruption

[OmCheeto]

...
I wondering how much volume of lava this eruption has put out.

Between 6 and 9 million cubic meters.
ref: 4:10 in the following video


Scientist [Steve Brantley, Deputy Scientist-in-Charge, USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory] Describes Eruption Changes (Jun. 6, 2018)
Big Island Video News
Published on Jun 6, 2018

One fun thing I've been doing over the last few days is trying to figure out what "Earthquake numbers" mean, as there have been A LOT in the Kilauea caldera.
I came up with: joules = 2.825×10^(1.5×(Magnitude+2.9))

It seemed to match pretty closely what the pdf chart on page 4 from the British Geological Survey stated, so, I'm sticking to it.
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/downloads/start.cfm?id=661
Earthquake_magnitude.pdf

 

[Borg]

From the HVO Webcams:

Live Panorama of Puʻu ʻŌʻō Crater Single Frame from the North Rim [POcam]
Last Updated 2018-06-08 06:12:11 (HST)

I'm guessing that they might have to replace that camera.

Doh. Thanks Om!

 

[OmCheeto]

From the HVO Webcams:

Live Panorama of Puʻu ʻŌʻō Crater Single Frame from the North Rim [POcam]
Last Updated 2018-06-08 06:12:11 (HST)
https://www.physicsforums.com/attachments/226724

Ummmm... Before anyone interprets that image as "It looks like ejecta!", I would like to point out that camera has a dirty lens.

It's looked like that for about a month.

 

[Borg]

I was wondering why the image appeared to get brighter over the last hour. I saw that the 'ejecta' hadn't moved but it didn't occur to me that the lens was just dirty.

 

[OmCheeto]

I was wondering why the image appeared to get brighter over the last hour. I saw that the 'ejecta' hadn't moved but it didn't occur to me that the lens was just dirty.

Aside from the rise and fall of lava levels in that vent/tube, there has been almost no seismic activity there over the last 30 days.

Now, although not quite as "Hollywoodish" as vent #8 and its flows, the Halema'uma'u crater expansion is a great maths/physics problem.

According to my always suspicious maths, the earthquake (energy) activity in the vent matches, within an order of magnitude, the energy released by the collapse of the east crater wall.

Expressed as a function of volume:

9,000,000 m^3 (magnitude of earthquakes)
13,000,000 m^3 (eyeballing the volume)​

 

[OmCheeto]

hmmmm...

That's weird. I've seen that number before:

Expressed as a function of volume:
9,000,000 m^3

9 million cubic meters.

Might be just a coincidence.

 

[davenn]

Between 6 and 9 million cubic meters.

and that's not total

that is PER DAY !

 

[BillTre]

So this seems like a rather smallish eruption by volume.
This one might be 9 x 30 days (my approximation) = 270 x 1,000,000 cubic meters

Big eruptions seem to usually be measured in cubic kilometers (1,000,000,000 cubic meters).

It looks like explosive type volcanoes eruptive volumes are usually measured as volume of tuff, which to me seems like a fluffed up version of lava (due to released dissolved gasses) while effusive eruptions are just a volume of lava (gas free).
Big eruptions of both kinds can be 1,000's of cubic kilometers.

 

[OmCheeto]

and that's not total

that is PER DAY !

Good catch! Not sure why I left off the "per day" in that post.

Now I want to kick myself for not posting what I saw just a few minutes later.

USGS Volcanoes
Yesterday at 12:12

How much lava has erupted since May 3?
113.5 million cubic meters (0.11 cubic kilometers, 4008.2 million cubic feet)
That's enough to fill 45,400 Olympic-sized swimming pools, cover Manhattan Island to a depth of 6.5 feet, or fill 11.3 million average dump trucks.​

I recall thinking, "11 isn't that much more than 9", I'll just leave it at that.
Maybe this is why people keep sending me links to "eyeglass sales".

So this seems like a rather smallish eruption by volume.
This one might be 9 x 30 days (my approximation) = 270 x 1,000,000 cubic meters

Not that bad for an approximation.

Big eruptions seem to usually be measured in cubic kilometers (1,000,000,000 cubic meters).

It looks like explosive type volcanoes eruptive volumes are usually measured as volume of tuff, which to me seems like a fluffed up version of lava (due to released dissolved gasses) while effusive eruptions are just a volume of lava (gas free).
Big eruptions of both kinds can be 1,000's of cubic kilometers.

Someone should calculate the volume of "The Big Island", from its peak down to the sea floor. It's all old (and new) lava.
hmmm... I've got nothing to do.

Roughly 100,000 km³

Age of the island: 500,000 years ?
(Is it really that young?)

If so, that's only 1/5 km³ per year.
Or 200,000,000 m³ per year.

hmm... If these calculations are anywhere close to being correct, it would appear that the people living in the "rift zone" have been very fortunate.

From the USGS reference above; "That's a lot of lava, but it's only 1/2 the amount of the 1984 Mauna Loa eruption."

But then again:

Mantle supply rates [ref Oregon State University]:

...
Because the discharge rates of almost all tube-fed pahoehoe eruptions on both and Mauna Loa seem to have been between 2 and 5 cubic meters per second, this has been proposed to be the supply rate to each volcano from the mantle (Swanson 1972; Dzurisin et al. 1984; Rowland & Walker 1990). You may recall from the beginning of this review that dividing the total volume of Mauna Loa by its estimated age yields essentially the same value. This would imply that all magma supplied from the mantle is erupted onto the surface; this is definitely not the case. When the volume of lava erupted onto the surface at Mauna Loa since the arrival of westerners (1778) is divided by the time since 1778, the rate is only 1 cubic meter per second, and a similar calculation for Kilauea yields a value of only 0.2 cubic meter/sec.

These values are 3 and 15 times smaller than the proposed supply rate of about 3 meters per second. These relationships point out the pitfalls of looking only at the surfaces of volcanoes for short periods of their lives, and suggest that the ratio of intruded:erupted magma is high at both Mauna Loa and Kilauea.​

2 m³/sec = 60,000,000 m³/year
5 m³/sec = 160,000,000 m³/year (Woo hoo! My maths might be correct!)

0.2 m³/sec = 6,000,000 m³/year

Conclusion: None.
But it's interesting to think about.

 

[davenn]

Age of the island: 500,000 years ?
(Is it really that young?)

The oldest above sea level part is a bit older than that at around 700,000 to 1 million yrs.
Refer to one of my earlier posts describing the 5 volcanoes of the "Big Island"
So the undersea parts go back a number of millions of years earlier

 

[OmCheeto]

The oldest above sea level part is a bit older than that at around 700,000 to 1 million yrs.
Refer to one of my earlier posts describing the 5 volcanoes of the "Big Island"
So the undersea parts go back a number of millions of years earlier

I did that, and saw that my "500,000 years" comment was off by a factor of 2, if you were referring to post #41, and the "big island" only.
It says Kohala and Mauna Kea, the oldest, are both 1,000,000 years old.

Volcano      age(years)  sea breach
Kohala        1,000,000     500,000
Mauna Kea     1,000,000
Hualālai                    300,000   
Mauna Loa       700,000     400,000
Kīlauea         450,000     100,000  (age averaged from stated 300k-600k posted range)

I did some further research and came up with the similar numbers. (Actually quite fun.)

 

[BillTre]

Here is a link to a GIF-like zoomable Kīlauea lava flow map.

 

[davenn]

Here is a link to a GIF-like zoomable Kilauea lava flow map.

good … hadn't seen that one

here's the zoomable map of flows that I had been using

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?hl=en&mid=1CvBhH9wEeztBrqYbsGDi4YjU1k1QH5AL&ll=19.483785342721027,-154.85507340355224&z=14

 

[nsaspook]

https://www.dvidshub.net/video/607849/river-lava-during-big-island-lava-flow
https://www.dvidshub.net/video/6073...-provide-security-during-big-island-lava-flow

 

[davenn]

WOW, some serious SO₂ ( Sulfur Dioxide) emission rates

just watching a USGS update video for the 14 June 2018

The summit emission rate is currently ~ 1,800 tons / day
The East Rift Zone emission rate is currently ~ 19,000 tons / day

 

[anorlunda]

Is this the portion that's supposed to break off and fall into the ocean?

No, that portion is named California.

 

[OmCheeto]

This seems kind of unreal.

 

[davenn]

This seems kind of unreal.

farrrrrrrrrrrrrr out !

if it wasn't for the normal looking speed of the 2 people walking back down off the lava field to the vehicle,
I would have said that the video had been sped up. In the dozens of videos I have watched over the last 6
weeks, NONE of them have shown the laver river flowing at that speed.

If it is real, that is mindblowing !
I am not sure if you could fake a video like that by having the top half of the frame running at a different frame rate than the bottom half ?
Video editing isn't one of my fortes

Dave

 

[OmCheeto]

farrrrrrrrrrrrrr out !

if it wasn't for the normal looking speed of the 2 people walking back down off the lava field to the vehicle,
I would have said that the video had been sped up. In the dozens of videos I have watched over the last 6
weeks, NONE of them have shown the laver river flowing at that speed.

If it is real, that is mindblowing !
I am not sure if you could fake a video like that by having the top half of the frame running at a different frame rate than the bottom half ?
Video editing isn't one of my fortes

Dave

Per the USGS on Twitter:

USGS Volcanoes
‏Verified account @USGSVolcanoes
7 hours ago

In Kīlauea Volcano’s #LERZ lava from fissure 8 builds a spatter cone over 170 ft tall. Lava exiting fissure 8 travels ~15 mph, slowing to ~2 mph near the ocean entry at Kapoho. https://bit.ly/2tcK3v2​

In a Facebook video posted by the USGS, the lava seems to be just as fast.



Though now I'm really confused.
From a distance, why does lava shooting out of the ground into the air look like the film has been slowed down, while lava running horizontally makes it seem the film has been sped up?

 

[davenn]

From a distance, why does lava shooting out of the ground into the air look like the film has been slowed down, while lava running horizontally makes it seem the film has been sped up?

cuz it takes much more energy to push skywards against gravity then to flow horizontally like a river

That horizontal speed in that latest video from you easily compares to that other video

 

[OmCheeto]

cuz it takes much more energy to push skywards against gravity then to flow horizontally like a river

That horizontal speed in that latest video from you easily compares to that other video

And in spite of what my eyes see, the maths seems to work out.
I digitized the path of a projectile yesterday, snagged a number from the time vs height chart I posted a few days ago(1 sec = 16 feet), did some maths:

and came up with a horizontal speed of ≈20 mph, which was close enough for me.

I also did another calculation, based on a somewhat humorous question on Twitter; "Oh my god! The world is deflating! Where does all this lava go??" (paraphrased, as I'm too lazy to look it up)

It seems that the current to date lava volumetric output [0.2 km³] is about 1 part in 5 trillion of the Earth's volume [1 trillion km³]. This is equivalent to a human losing 7 cells.
(Which I suppose a biologist could rightly yell at me for, as they range in volume by about 5 orders of magnitude [ref]: sperm cell ≈30 µm³ --- oocyte ≈4,000,000 µm³, but I don't really care.)

 

[OmCheeto]

While waiting for Kilauea to do something, you might want to watch this:



Hot spots!

ps. Nick Zentner is a most awesome speaker, IMHO.

 

[davenn]

While waiting for Kilauea to do something, you might want to watch this:

Hot spots!

ps. Nick Zentner is a most awesome speaker, IMHO.

Excellent lecture... thanks for posting

 

[OmCheeto]

This is kind of surreal:

 

[OmCheeto]

This is also kind of surreal:

 

[nsaspook]

 

[NTL2009]

This is also kind of surreal:

Can someone explain what we are looking at? I can't tell what is ground, sea or sky/clouds/steam. I saw some streaks, I was thinking they were stars at night, or reflections, or lava under water, or ? But it is interesting.

 

[OmCheeto]

Can someone explain what we are looking at? I can't tell what is ground, sea or sky/clouds/steam. I saw some streaks, I was thinking they were stars at night, or reflections, or lava under water, or ? But it is interesting.

We are looking at the glow of the river of lava at night from fissure 8 to the ocean entry.
The camera is located at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea (19.824083° -155.469627°)
I believe the city lights are those of Hilo.
The distance from the camera to fissure 8 is about 70 km.
[ref]

 

[OmCheeto]

This is also kind of surreal:

Well... Poop!

It appears the Facebook user has removed this video from public view.
To see it, you can go to http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/gallery/cloudcams/video.php?cam=cloudcam3 and click on the image labeled Jul01-2018 at the bottom of the screen.
The videos are MP4 format, so I don't think they are directly link-able to PF. Though you can right click on them and save them to your PC, which is nice. (Just in case these guys decide to also remove them )

 

[BillTre]

Well... Poop!

It appears the Facebook user has removed this video from public view.
To see it, you can go to http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/gallery/cloudcams/video.php?cam=cloudcam3 and click on the image labeled Jul01-2018 at the bottom of the screen.
The videos are MP4 format, so I don't think they are directly link-able to PF. Though you can right click on them and save them to your PC, which is nice. (Just in case these guys decide to also remove them )

Wow, that is pretty weird!