Kilauea Volcano erupts overnight on Hawaii Island
By Robert Buan
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HONOLULU (KITV) — On Hawaii Island, Kilauea began eruption again during the early minutes of Monday morning.
The United States Geological Survey reported that an eruption at the Kilauea caldera began at around 12:30amHT Monday morning. This followed a Sunday afternoon when USGS were already on alert following a sequence of tremors.
Early indications – including data comparable to an eruption 50 years ago – suggest that the current level of volcanic activity presented no imminent danger to areas around Kilauea.
“We expect this eruption if it’s like the December 1974 eruption that only lasted for about six hours,” said Ken Hon from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. “The real problem is getting to the eruption while it’s going rather than having the eruption, getting someplace where it’ll bother people. It’s out in a very unoccupied part of the park so there’s no direct threat to any structures, roads, not even trails at this point. There’s a possibility it could overrun the southwest deserts to the east of Mauna Iki. But that’s about the only thing out there that is in any threat at the moment.”
The overnight activity followed an Sunday afternoon of tremors around Kilauea changing the alert levels.
“We know that that seismic activity picked up around noon yesterday and really intensified it about 3pm,” Hon added. “We were expecting an eruption somewhere around 3 to 6pm with the intensity of seismicity we were seeing Then the seismicity really backed down and things quieted down some.
That quiet changed just after midnight Monday as eruption began.
Hon notes that the location of the activity suggests that this is a continuation of activity from earlier this year.
“That is exactly where we put all the lava and a big intrusion that almost broke the surface at the end of January, early February,” Hon recounted “I think what happened is that it basically broke open with very little seismicity through the system that was pumped up at the end of January.”
The activity is in the same location – over a mile south of the caldera – where the December 1974 eruption unfolded.
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