With another Kilauea eruption on pause, geologists are unsure when the volcano will resume activity.
The latest eruption, which began June 8, petered to a halt just 12 days later on Monday evening, but scientists at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory aren’t officially calling it pau just yet.
“Deciding whether it’s over is a dynamic question,” HVO geologist Mike Zoeller said Wednesday. “It depends on the readings we get. If we get get more inflation at the summit, that could indicate that it’s going to start up again soon. If it levels off, that could mean it’s calming down, that sort of thing.
“Right now, we’re not seeing any indications of the eruption restarting,” Zoeller said. “But if it does restart, it could happen weeks or months later, or it could be a start of a new eruption.”
For the 12 days it was active, the eruption left an impression.
Zoeller said that last weekend generated some of the “most dramatic” eruptive activity seen on the volcano in years, with towering lava plumes and collapsing lava spires. But that activity itself means the pause isn’t unexpected.
“That kind of activity isn’t really sustainable,” Zoeller said, explaining that the rate of lava emission at the summit outstripped the speed at which it could be drawn from the volcano’s magma plumbing.
Even so, Zoeller said, the latest pause came unusually abruptly, with lava and gas emissions still strong throughout Monday before suddenly and rapidly declining that afternoon.
He said geologists have theorized that the pause could have been caused by a clog in the volcanic vent, a theory supported by increased inflation at the summit.
If the eruption is over, it would be one of the shorter Kilauea eruptions of the last century. But Zoeller said that although Kilauea’s longest eruption — the Pu‘u ‘O‘o eruption that lasted from 1983 until 2018 — looms large in people’s memories, the volcano often has had periods of intermittent, smaller eruptions, particularly following more severe events.
“I think this most closely resembles the period people saw after 1924,” Zoeller said, referring to a series of violent collapses of the Halema‘uma‘u caldera floor nearly a century ago, which was followed in subsequent years by similar shorter-scale eruptions.
“These eruptions today are emitting more than they did, but it looks a lot similar.”
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.