Kilauea erupts, destroying webcam [video]

Hawaii volcanism is what geologists seem to call "nice and friendly" - low viscosity lava, not prone to explosive eruptions (unlike the stratovolcanoes of the Andes or the Pacific rim in general) - this is because it's caused by hotspot volcanism in Hawaii.

I was at the Fagradalsfjall eruption at 2023. Had been to Iceland for two weeks w wife and daughter, and on the last day (since the signs were there) I decided to postpone travel home for two days (w + child wanted to go home). On my last day, the hike opened up and I went at approx 2100 hours to the volcano. That was an approx 10 km hike one way.

Amazing experience. A bunch of us were stupid as can be, but got as close as approx 50 m. Sounds really dangerous, but the sputter were not that violent yet, and the ground sloped away from us. Still, really stupidly dangerous (the sputter wall could've broken down, wind direction change, etc). But it didn't. Lots of moss fires, and walked into a small slope and immediately felt a sting in my nose and lungs from trapped gases so took that as a nope and went back.

Started walking back at 0130 something, boarded flight at 0600, fainted (I had done Mt Esja in the morning too). Sorry other passengers, it was inconsiderate of me and I was an asshole for that. But... that experience...!

Same here. I'd add that viewing the lava fountain at night was a mesmerizing experience. You get to see the full extent of red, glowing lava lake and the fountain. There were thousands of people and yet they appeared so small in front of the volcano. We did experience some ash and Pele's hair on the way to the park, near the black sand beach. I do recommend carrying a torch though at night, since it is pitch black at night. The lava illuminated the park with the red glow, but there were some parts where you do need a torch esp. if you park far away and walk.

I was reading about shield volcanoes and it sounds like the low viscosity lava is the defining feature. So the flow is par for the course.

I am severely tempted to hop on a flight to go and see it, but wondering if it's such a "once in a lifetime" thing to go see? That, and if it'll peter out by the time I get there, and $500+ to just fly on a whim and stay overnight.

Sadly there was an ongoing eruption when me and my SO visited the Big Island, so the entire park was closed. Was a bit bummed out, on the other hand people lost their homes so keeping it in perspective.

That said, I second visiting the Big Island and visit various sites. Driving less than an hour and going from barren volcanic landscapes to lush rainforests was something else, and watching the sunset from Mauna Kea was magical. And lots of great beaches, and most that weren't next to a resort had very few people.

While the island is big relative to the other Hawaiian islands, its small enough that you can drive around it in a day.

I'd recommend staying on the Kona side, which is the dry and somewhat barren side. The Hilo side has rainforests for a reason.

Decades ago, my wife and I visited the Big Island during a fairly sedate eruption. We drove down Chain of Craters Road, got to see a tiny lava flow (talking like a couple feet of glowing honey), but were wanting more. In the distance, we could see a huge steam column where a lava stream was reaching the sea. We asked one of the ever-attendant Park Rangers if we could walk over there. He said no.

But then he said - we close at 5pm, and there are no gates. OK, we can take a hint.

We drove to Hilo and bought cheap tennis and flashlights, then scurried back down Chain of Craters after 6. As the sky darkened, we walked towards the steam column. The rocks beneath our feet showed incandescent glows deep in the cracks, and we started to smell burned rubber from our cheap tennis. Eventually, we came to the lava outfall.

We watched nearly an hour as a river of molten rock cascaded into the ocean. We used our water bottles on our shoe soles, turning back when we ran dry.

I now understand that we were stupid - apparently the park loses a few tourists to shelf collapse each year - but we lived, and the memory is a treasure. Thank you, Mr. Ranger.

And yes, it's like being on a different planet - like being on our own, maybe 4 billion years ago.

Haleakalā is like this as well. Don't just drive up the crater - hike through the thing. It's a ~12 mile hike. It's a remarkable experience because the landscape changes so frequently and dramatically from desert to tropical forest.

The only comp to this is like the transition in Max Max from the desert to the oasis.

Tourists that drive to the crater, take pictures, and drive down have no idea what they're missing.

Went there a little over a year ago. The steam vents were active, but no eruptions. The exhibits are wonderful and the birdsong in the evening is amazing.

As postal mentioned below, Haleakalā is fantastic for that.

Also, I recently visited Mt. Aso in southern Kyushu of Japan and it really felt like I was on Mars.

Definitely a place to visit if you can. I traveled there in 1983 just as it was starting to erupt and visited a lot of places that are now under lava rock! In a later visit we were walking out to see one of the "peep holes" where you can see the lava down below and the rocks started getting slippery, except they weren't slippery it was our shoe soles melting, oops.

How would you compare it to Iceland regarding volcanoes and all? Thats what we Europeans have in our backyard and its a properly stunning and otherwordly experience.

It’s not real, lava has not flowed into the ocean for many years.

Nothing looks right. The waterfall of lava to the caldera. How do you get magma ring above a non erupting caldera? It's 100% fake.

Are these giant buildings over there? Would be easy to check their existence (though the photo could be real but the lava is not)

That photo is pretty clearly fake.

* The steam from lava should be arising from where the lava hits the lava, boiling it--there's not going to be any steam from the interior of a lava tube, because all of the water will have boiled out long ago.

* It looks like somebody dumped a photo of a black rock field on top of a different image. There's a sploch of a normal tan-sand beach at the base of part of this cliffs; in recent lava activity, the lava will extend fully into the ocean and collapse. Given that the edge of the lava is a) pretty towering and yet b) some distance from the sea.

* The lava activity in the extreme foreground is pretty sketchy. It's not entirely implausible to have lava flowing into a pit like that in some fashion, but there's also no clear source from the lava, and real Hawaiian lava flows tend to look somewhat different than that.

* Lava flows downhill from a rift zone. Where's the rift zone here? It's basically a wall of black rock. Photogammetry is not my strong suit, but the presumably dried lava is towering above the treetops in the distance, and yet there's no clear sense of where the lava is flowing from.

* In the background, you see something more akin to a stratovolcano (actually, might well be an eroded granite dike or some other weird formation like that as opposed to a volcano in the first place). Hawaiian volcanoes are shield volcanoes, they don't look like that. Also, Kilauea and Mauna Loa are too active to really have the deeply-eroded look like that. You have to go to Kohala on the Big Island to get that kind of look.

* Kilauea is nowhere near the ocean. (Also, shield volcano, you can't see the top from the base.)

* There's another island clearly visible in the background. None of the Hawaiian islands are close enough to each other to generally be visible from one another! And certainly not from any view of Kilauea, which is the last volcano in the chain that's above sea level. (Loihi still has another 3,000 feet to go before it pokes above the surface.)

That user has submitted 58,000 photos. It's AI. Everyone should be reporting the photo and the account.

There's a lot of really spammy data on Google maps that should be pretty easy for them to detect too. Go look at some remote locations and you'll find lots of images that advertise businesses, products and all sorts. Wondering if they're using it for image hosting.

You just have to look at the picture of the person who uploaded it: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a-/ALV-UjW5veVXQHmH8s4Db3W...

This screams AI, 100%

Both the photo and the uploading account are now gone.

icy what you did there

It's just the weight of literally everything on the planet pushing down, as well as miles of rock :)

Indeed. I just wish we could get a better sense of the scale, which is always hard in nature shots devoid of trees or human structures. A productive use of AI would be to place some houses and automobiles in the video for scale.

Looks like the camera and stream are still active...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BqmpkUdMtyA

iirc, Pompeii was a pyroclastic flow [0], a fast-moving current of hot gas and volcanic matter with speeds between 100-700 km/hr and temperatures up to 1000°C. So, probably something like that, but a lot bigger, faster, and arriving faster from further away.

I was surprised how long the camera lasted getting buried. It'd be a not good end.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroclastic_flow

there is a poignant set of images taken by a photographer Robert Landsburg who chose to post himself too close to the blow up of the top of Mount Saint Helens in 1980.

the last picture from his salvaged camera is similar to what we see for this topic: https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads... his camera was found under this body, with speculation that he was protecting it, which doesn't seem unlikely, but it also would not be surprising for him not to have had that presence of mind, things were happening very quickly.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/robert-landsburg

Although it will stop erupting any time I get on a plane headed there. Same for Iceland.

> The threat level for airplanes is set to orange... for anyone dumb enough to fly over an erupting volcano.

Even 180km away from the eruption, airplanes can be seriously damaged [1].

Jet engines really, really do not like to ingest anything else than air and, maybe, a tad bit of water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009

An erupting volcano can spew ash over a large distance. When Eya.... that Icelandic volcano (that's hard to spell because I don't know Icelandic) erupted several years ago, the ash cloud traveled far enough to disrupt travel over most of Europe for a few days.

I dunno... Different times, different risk tolerance.

Back in 1980, my dad was sitting at his desk in Bellevue one morning when news came in that Mt. St. Helens was erupting. Him and a pilot friend had the presence of mind to head straight to the local airport and rent a plane.

"Be careful not to head South. Mt. St. Helens is erupting, and you sure don't want to get close that by accident."

"Oh, yeah, sure. No way we'd do something like that."

He has this amazing framed aerial photo of the mountain with the ash plume rising. Evidently, the flight home was pure chaos, bobbing and weaving to avoid dozens of midair collisions since every other pilot in the Seattle area had had the same idea, but 45 minutes later.

A little bit of educated guessing on my part:

The purple frames have a bunch of gradients to white, which looks a lot like what happens when the infrared filter on most color cameras is removed and a bunch of IR light is shone into then. For some reason the green cells are less sensitive to IR, which results in a purple-ish hue. So in this case, perhaps the lava striking the camera melted through the lens holder and shifted the IR filter out of place, or is just able to shine intense IR light into the gap between the filter and the sensor.

In those same frames, the dark areas with noisy borders are I believe an artifact of the CMOS sensor digitization process when cells get strongly overwhelmed. I've seen the same patterns on cameras where an extremely intense light (e.g. a laser pointer) is shone into them. It's like the cells get so overwhelmed they roll around back to zero.

The amorphous shapes at the very end are clearly from the lens being totally detached / moved out of position, allowing defocused light to hit the sensor. I didn't spot any interesting sensor or encoder death frames before the video ends, so likely the lava severed the ethernet cable or destroyed the electronics at that point.

Definitely don't think about how much "nice" equipment is bought, used once or twice and then sits in a cupboard forever until disposed of in a skip when someone dies or a company goes under and the building is cleared.

My last place had a whole box full of FPGA dev boards that I would have killed to play with as an undergrad.

The real pities are in machining where what looks like a junk heap to the family may actually be a priceless trove of rare tools and irreplaceable machine parts. Not to mention lovingly-made tools and jigs. A physical cousin to unpublished software sitting on a thrown-away hard drive.

Think of it like a delicious meal or a grenade. You pay for it to be consumed once, then it's gone.

That thing took a licking and kept on ticking.

USGS has a page on the history of Kilauea here: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/science/geology-and-h..., which also has some links on some of the eruptions in recorded history.

Probably the closest thing to what you're looking for is here: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/kilauea-caldera-simplified..., which lists the age of the most recent lave flows as of 2008 (when Halema'uma'u started filling up again). The 2018 eruption caused another caldera collapse within the crater, enlarging Halema'uma'u and creating a new mini-caldera that's labeled as the "down-dropped block" in subsequent maps, e.g. https://www.usgs.gov/maps/october-5-2021-kilauea-summit-erup... ... although, since then, Halema'uma'u has erupted enough lava to more or less fill the entire down-dropped block, see, e.g., the most recent map: https://www.usgs.gov/maps/november-25-2025-kilauea-summit-er...

Would be nice to have a mobile phone live streaming webcam viewer that vibrates when the webcam is destroyed!

That is not AI. The same voice narrates at least two years ago. Just scroll down in the channel's video list.

Well it would've been better if they kept the video on the actual camera that ate it instead of switching back and forth constantly. It's not Liam Neeson climbing a fence, guys.

If we're lucky, we (humanity) get to experience another supervolcano eruption sometime in the future, and then we'll finally get some good content out of it.

The toughest thing to realize is that it is not obvious. Other posters here say it's a human, which was my assumption. But I wouldn't bet my savings either way anymore.

Synthetic text-to-speech and “Ai” generated are not the same thing. We’ve been doing TTS for 30 years now - get over it