{"id":105101,"date":"2018-12-12T10:00:26","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T10:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bnreport.com\/heres-what-was-surprising-about-kilaueas-3-month-long-eruption\/"},"modified":"2018-12-12T10:00:26","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T10:00:26","slug":"heres-what-was-surprising-about-kilaueas-3-month-long-eruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bnreport.com\/en\/heres-what-was-surprising-about-kilaueas-3-month-long-eruption\/","title":{"rendered":"Heres what was surprising about Kilaueas 3-month-long eruption"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 After a stunningly explosive summer, Kilauea, the worlds longest continuously erupting volcano, finally seems to have taken a break. But the scientists studying it havent. Reams of new data collected during an unprecedented opportunity to monitor an ongoing, accessible eruption are changing whats known about how some volcanoes behave.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was hugely significant,\u201d says Jessica Larsen, a petrologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and \u201ca departure from what Kilauea had been doing for more than 35 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The latest eruption started in May. By the time it had ended three months later, over 825 million cubic meters of earth had collapsed at the summit. Thats the equivalent of 300,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, Kyle Anderson, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geologic Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., said December 11 in a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.<\/p>\n

As the summit crater deflated, magma gushed through underground tunnels, draining out through fissures along an area called the lower eastern rift zone at a rate of roughly 50 meters per day. That lava eventually covered 35.5 square kilometers<\/a> of land, Anderson and his colleagues reported in a study published December 11 in Science<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The volcano also taught scientists a thing or two.<\/p>\n

Caldera collapse[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\n

Scientists previously believed that groundwater plays a big role in how a caldera collapses. When craters were drained of their magma, \u201ccooling, cracking depressurized the caldera, allowing groundwater to seep in and create a series of explosive eruptions,\u201d Anderson said. \u201cBut groundwater did not play a significant role in driving the explosions this summer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, the destruction of Kilaueas crater is whats called a piston-style caldera collapse, he said. Sixty-two small collapse events rattled the volcano from mid-May to late August, with each collapse causing the crater to sink and pushing the surrounding land out and up. By the end, the center of the volcano sank by as much as 500 meters \u2014 more than the height of the Empire State Building.<\/p>\n

That activity didnt just destroy the crater. \u201cWe could see surges in the eruption rate 40 kilometers away whenever there was a collapse,\u201d Anderson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n