Source: Howard Hitchcock

Visiting the Big Island. Part II

Visiting Big Island and seeing live lava at Kahauale a 2 lava flow of Kilauea part 2 Into the belly of the beast Jesper Sandberg Introduction It is hard to describe how incredibly special for me those days in Kilauea were and the insanely strong nostalgia for that. In part two I will take up…

Visiting the Big Island

Visiting the Big Island and seeing live lava at Kahauale a 2 lava flow of Kilauea. Part 1 The first days on the Big Islands western side Introduction Its hard to describe how amazing it was for me to see Kilaueas lava flows live in action ( Pele cursed my own future by touching her…

Trouble in Paradise: awakening Mauna Loa

An eruption has started at the summit of Mauna Loa. It has been a long wait! The inflation over the past month was notable, though not exceptional, but it was the drip that made the volcanic bucket overflow. We now need to see what happens. Commonly, eruptions migrate down the rift zone, in this case…

Kilauea III. Rifts under Hawaii.

Here is the third part of my Kilauea series that was promised, a bit more delayed than I would have wished though. Many things have happened at Kilauea since the previous part. A sill intrusion took place in the Upper Southwest Rift in August, then on September 29, about a month after the sill, lava…

Making a shield volcano

Looking back to when Fagradalsfjall eruption started, I wrote a post about the Reykjanes Fires, where I speculated about how the eruption could end up being like. I mentioned two main possibilities. One was that it would turn out similar to the eruptions of the Brennisteinsfjöll volcanic system that took place 1000 years ago. The…

Kilauea II: Roots of the Hawaiian Islands

In my previous article, here, I discussed how Kilauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes are connected to each other through the Pahala Swarm. Now I have to deal with a confrontation of theories that is inevitable. There is a classical model of how Hawaii works. It is all about the mantle plume. The classical view establishes…

Kilauea I: Magma waves from the phantom rift

Each volcano is an expression of a magma architectural construction, a great sculpture of chambers, pipes and sills, as intricate as an ant colony, or rather like the roots of a plant. This is all hidden away from our view, under kilometres or tens of kilometres of rock that makes it impossible for us to…

The Kilauea 2020 eruption – reading tea leaves

This is a strange end to a strange year. Kilauea erupting without even HVO noticing it until the lava was flowing, Etna exploding into life, and even New Zealand trying to get in on the action. And we were complaining that nothing was happening and we had to live off the glories of Christmas past…

Seas of Hawaiʻi

Hawai’i is an amazing place. And not just for volcanologists. This is a world-on-an-island, with (apart from the most accessible eruptions in the world) Mars-sized mountains, pristine beaches, coral reefs, a world class city for shopaholics and night owls, rain forest with world-class mosquitos, desert, archaeology, astronomy, volcanoes, agriculture, flying fish and diving birds. It…