Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Photo and Video Chronology - Kīlauea - October 23, 2013

By Kīlauea October 23, 2013

Thermal image sequence of summit lava lake motion.

Thermal image sequence of summit lava lake motion

Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details
This thermal image sequence shows the typical motion of the lava lake in Halema‘uma‘u Crater. For scale, the lake is about 160 meters (520 feet) wide in this view. The clip spans about 12 minutes, and is shown at 30x speed. The lava upwells along the north margin of the lava lake (in this view, near the top of the image). The crust slowly migrates towards the south, where it sinks back into the magmatic system along the south and southeast margins of the lake (bottom of image). The surface moves at roughly 0.5 meters per second, or about 1 mile per hour. The lake surface consists of numerous thin plates of crust, separated by hot cracks. As the lake surface migrates, these plates split, merge and change shape.

Get Our News

These items are in the RSS feed format (Really Simple Syndication) based on categories such as topics, locations, and more. You can install and RSS reader browser extension, software, or use a third-party service to receive immediate news updates depending on the feed that you have added. If you click the feed links below, they may look strange because they are simply XML code. An RSS reader can easily read this code and push out a notification to you when something new is posted to our site.

Hawaii News

Hawaiian Volcano Observatory News

Kīlauea News

Natural Hazards News

United States of America News

Volcano Hazards Program News