Image and video catalog of the 2018 summit collapse and lower East Rift Zone eruption of Kīlauea volcano, Island of Hawaiʻi, Hawaii

This data release contains an image and video catalog of the 2018 summit collapse and lower East Rift Zone eruption of Kīlauea volcano, on the Island of Hawaiʻi. An intrusion of magma into Kīlauea’s lower East Rift Zone resulted in a four-month-long eruption from May 3 to September 5, 2018 (Neal and others, 2018). The eruption produced lava flows that covered an area of 35.5 square kilometers with lava and destroyed 723 structures. As the eruption progressed, the summit lava lake drained and magma withdrew from the shallow summit reservoir, resulting in incremental caldera collapse from May to early August 2018. Each of the 62 summit collapse events released energy equivalent to a magnitude-5.3 earthquake. The total summit collapse volume was about 0.8 cubic kilometers, with subsidence of more than 500 meters in some places.

USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory staff, associates, and visitors monitored these events and their associated hazards, documenting them through digital images and videos. This data release contains a sub-sample of the multimedia collected, and it includes 10,334 photographs and 428 videos recorded between May 1, 2018, and September 7, 2018. Images and videos are contained in compressed folders by date of activity. A CSV file contains the compiled image and video metadata, including the data release title, file name (which includes the date and photographer's last name), file type, file size, location, and keywords, which were assigned based on internal USGS information sharing during the response in near-real-time. A document on the landing page provides a list of all keywords used in the data release. Note that diacritical marks are omitted in keywords to facilitate functionality. Please refer to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names for the spellings with diacritical marks: https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/domestic-names. Images and videos in this data release are public domain and may be used with a credit to the “U.S. Geological Survey.” Users are encouraged to use their discretion in sharing multimedia showing damaged or impacted infrastructure.

Catalog material was captured on a variety of devices in a variety of formats. Internal clocks and GPS settings record event locations and times but are not always reliable. Multimedia may have been lightly edited to improve quality. Some video files included in this catalog were clipped from their longer original files to reduce the file size. Note that image files contain keywords in their metadata, but video files do not support that capability. Files in the catalog have been renamed by year, month, and date, followed by the last name of the photographer and any identifiable photo number. A typical example of a photo label is “20180515_SWANSON_P23451.” This annotated photo label indicates that the image was taken by a scientist with the last name Swanson on May 15, 2018, with the original photo number of P23451. Cell phone photos often yield extremely long photo numbers and where this occurred only the last segment of the photo number was used for the image label suffix. Related data releases by DeSmither and Diefenbach (2021) and DeSmither and others (2021) provide Unoccupied Aircraft Systems (UAS) video of these events.

References:

DeSmither, L.G., and Diefenbach, A.K., 2021, Unoccupied Aircraft Systems (UAS) video of the 2018 summit eruption of Kīlauea Volcano, Hawaii: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9MYKFWB.

DeSmither, L.G., Diefenbach, A.K., Dietterich, H.R., 2021, Unoccupied Aircraft Systems (UAS) video of the 2018 lower East Rift Zone eruption of Kīlauea Volcano, Hawaii: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9BVENTG.

Neal, Christina A., et al., 2019, The 2018 rift eruption and summit collapse of Kīlauea Volcano: Science, v. 363., no. 6425, p. 367-374.