Mocubix · Exhibit 07 · Kīlauea, Hawaiʻi · 2018
Kīlauea,
in four phases
Four phases of one eruption, each with its own light. Scroll past each dated line and the whole screen changes state at once: the photograph, the palette, the alert level, the instruments. Not before the line, and not gradually.
Scroll
The lake glows
Halemaʻumaʻu from the air. A lake of lava has filled the summit crater for ten years, lighting its own plume from below. On 30 April the floor of Puʻu ʻŌʻō collapses and the lake begins to drain: magma is on the move, underground, forty kilometres down the rift.
USGS · Public domain
The ground opens
The lower East Rift Zone cracks open along a residential street in Leilani Estates, and lava spatters through the palms. Twenty-four fissures open in three weeks. By 6 May the summit lake has fallen 220 metres.
USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory · Public domain
Fissure 8 takes over
One vent wins. Fissure 8 fountains eighty metres into the air, builds a cone fifty metres high, and feeds a river of lava that runs for weeks toward the sea.
USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory · Public domain
Lava meets the sea
In the first days of June the river reaches Kapoho Bay and boils it into a plume of acid steam; the bay is gone in two days. By August the flows have covered 35 square kilometres, added 875 acres of new land and taken more than 700 homes, and the summit floor has fallen 500 metres. Scroll back up, and every break snaps in reverse.
USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory · Public domain
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