Mauna Kea volcano snow-covered cinder cones and lava flows

Some of the large cinder and scoria cones atop Mauna Kea are more than 1.5 km in diameter and a few hundred meters tall. The cones are surrounded by lava flows that erupted from their flanks. When the youngest glacier covered the summit area 40,000 to 13,000 years ago, several eruptions took place beneath the ice. Most of the cones visible today on Mauna Kea were erupted between about 65,000 and 14,000 years ago.