Hot Lava Under My Feet

By Chris Dietel

I saw this “calm” volcano set off fireworks.

	We saw this explosion where hot lava was mixing with cold seawater. The heat made the water flash into steam. It threw globs of lava in all directions.

When scientists study a volcano called Kilauea (KEY-la-way-YAH), I often go along and take pictures. Kilauea is on the island of Hawaii, and it has been erupting almost nonstop since 1983.

This volcano doesn’t blow up the way some volcanoes do. Volcanoes explode because they have sticky lava that holds a lot of hot gases. When the lava comes up from deep in the Earth, those gases form bubbles, and then the bubbles pop. But the bubbles are so big and under so much pressure that their “pop” is a huge explosion.

When a stream of lava flows down a volcano, the lave surface cools off and turns into a crust of solid rock. It makes a giant tube of rock with hot lave flowing through it. The pictrure avove shows a big opening in one of these tubes. The opening is called a skylight. It lets scientists see down into the tube and take samples of the lava.

Kilauea has fluid lava. As the molten rock comes up, the gases escape a little at a time. Instead of exploding, the lava usually runs out of big cracks. Sometimes it may shoot up in a lava fountain. Then all the molten rock flows down toward the sea, cooling off along the way.

	This small whirlwind formed over the volcano, in a spot where hot air was rising up from a lava flow and mixing with rain clouds.

Like all active volcanoes, Kilauea has many dangers. But scientists can walk onto its hot, glassy crust of fresh lava. When I go along, I take pictures like these.