Volcano Watch

In late August, volcano scientists from around the world gathered in Waikōloa, Hawai‘i, and shared what they have learned about how Hawaiian volcanoes...

The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory has monitored, studied, and served as an information source about Hawaiian volcanism for the past 100 years.

In 1987, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO), over 400 Earth scientists from around the...

Seldom does one find evidence of an eruption where none was known before. We generally assume that Kīlauea erupts only at the summit or along its two...

Tuesday morning, July 31, started as a typical office day at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO). Beginning at 10:25 a.m., a number of text...

At 3:45 a.m., Friday, July 19, 1974, a flurry of earthquakes on Kīlauea triggered the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory's "tremor alarm." In response...

Most of us think of gravity as a constant. Students of physics know that gravitational acceleration is 9.8 m per second-squared (32 ft/s/s), while the...

The use of fingerprints, first considered as a means of identification in the 1880s, is now ubiquitous in murder mysteries, TV crime shows, and...

When William Ellis, the first Western visitor to the summit of Kīlauea, looked out over the broad and deep caldera in 1823, he noted that it "had been...

For decades, the State of Hawaii has been trying to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Energy from Hawai‘i geothermal resources is but one of...

Hawai‘i's eruptions over the past several decades have been relatively benign, being characterized mostly by persistent lava lake activity or lava...

Erupting volcanoes are obviously noisy places, but there are sounds that we do not hear as well. Infrasound is an acoustic wave with a frequency that...

In the past half-million years, Mauna Kea has supported an ice cap at least four times. These glaciations occur when the climate is cold and wet, when...

Residents of Hawai‘i are no strangers to earthquakes. Those of us on the Big Island, especially, are used to feeling several earthquakes every year...

As the Memorial Day weekend arrives, many Hawai‘i residents will head for the beach. Others might use the long break to visit family and friends or go...

The enormous explosive eruption of Novarupta, a new volcano on the Alaska Peninsula, in 1912 is exceptional for many reasons. It created the famous...

When Nevado del Ruiz volcano, Colombia, began showing signs of restless activity in December 1984 after more than a century of quiet, a formal volcano...

During 2012, HVO's Centennial Year, it's useful to recognize the careers of those scientists from whose work we have learned much. One such individual...

Adventurous tourists have an opportunity this summer for an experience reminiscent of the classic book and movie "Journey to the Center of the Earth"...

Some people think history is dull. Well, brace yourself. The past 1,000 years at Kīlauea have been anything but dull, providing an exciting, at times...