Kīlauea Volcano is showing signs of unrest as I write this - the daily update reads, on September 5, 2023:
The seismic and tilt data indicate that Kīlauea’s summit is becoming increasingly pressurized. Similar episodes of earthquake and ground deformation activity occurred in November 2020 and August 2021, prior to eruptions in December 2020 and September 2021. The unrest is currently confined within Kīlauea’s summit region and—if it continues—could escalate to an eruption in the coming days, weeks, or months.
You can watch a livestream here. I’m still pissed that I missed the moment it began erupting in January. It was around 2 in the morning and, insomniac that I am, I was awake. And there had been notices from USGS suggesting magma was on the move. But did I think to check the webcam? No!!!
This time, I’m looking at the webcam fairly often. Maybe I’ll get lucky and happen to be watching live when it goes off again.
Or maybe not - I may miss it, or, as USGS points out, it may not erupt any time soon. But a girl can dream.
The feed is down! The link just goes to a series of livestreams and the Kīlauea one, if you click on it, says “livestream not available.” This has happened before - it’ll be back at some point.
Meanwhile there is a still pic updated every 5 minutes. It’s got a big glowing spot right now (I’m writing this at just before midnight Hawai’i time), but with a still photo in the dark it’s hard to say what it is. Quite possibly just a strong light from some people/headlamps far beyond the crater. Probably that, as it’s not expanding - in fact it’s dimmer in the next pic.
It’s a bit confusing - the text to the lower right indicates it updates every 60 seconds - but it appears to be about every 10 minutes these days (I thought it used to be 5, but maybe I remembered incorrectly or maybe they changed it).
The live feed appears to be back … it’s hard to tell as it’s 01:00 and
it looks like an old crt tv static atm !
Or it could be a large lake of bubbling black lava/magma.
I missed the 2018 eruption by a couple of weeks. I was staying on the big island of Hawaii about 2 miles from where the lava river passed through. It would have been cool to have been there, but it probably would have been a logistical nightmare.
hmmm … 4 1/2 hours later, it still looks exactly the same. I thought it might
be a little bit clearer, ok it’s still only 05:25, but sunrise is less than an hour away.
Time will tell (It sometimes does).
eta: the other link is showing signs of daybreaking.
eta again, live link is now showing a slight lightening !! … all looks back to normal.
At least Kilauea is usually semi-civilized about it, so we might get to see something.
It’s always a shame when a webcam only records the first half-second of some eruption someplace before it gets shredded or vaporized or simply launched into near-orbit.
It’s interesting, the text in the daily update (this - same as I linked to earlier) has changed since yesterday. Usually the update is almost completely cut-n-paste from previous days, but they have now made it clear that the deflation-inflation and earthquakes are coming from SOUTH of the caldera not within it. So the next eruption might not be within the caldera, like the past few have been.
On the one hand, that’s interesting. On the other, it means the webcams may not be ideally placed to catch the activity.
For sure they’ll string some up, and launch some drones, once they do have surface activity. We may all miss the opening couple of hours, but odds are we won’t miss the whole show. As long as we’re content with watching non-realtime at least at first.
Something’s going on. I see four earthquakes in the last two hours. They’re mostly around the lava flows from 1952-1982. Unfortunately, USGS does not appear to have any cameras nearby.
