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Beginning around midnight on Saturday, April 21, Kīlauea Volcano's summit lava lake rose high enough that lava briefly spilled onto the floor of Halema‘uma‘u. Since then, additional overflows occurred in four pulses on April 22-23. The largest one occurred during the fourth pulse, which started at 6:30 a.m. today (Monday, April 23) and continued for about three hours, covering about a third of the crater floor with shiny black lava. Early this morning, HVO geologists (shown here) used a laser range-finder to measure the depth to the lava lake surface at its peak level. The silhouettes of HVO and Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park's Jaggar Museum are visible on the rim of Kīlauea's summit caldera (center high point). Mauna Loa can be seen in the far distance (left). The area around Halema‘uma‘u remains closed to the public due to ongoing volcanic hazards, including high sulfur dioxide gas emissions and unexpected rockfalls and explosions.
A helicopter overflight this afternoon (April 23) of Kīlauea Volcano's Halema‘uma‘u crater showed the extent of the largest overflow (silver gray) of the lava lake from approximately 6:30-9:30 a.m. this morning. The overflow covered much of the April/May 2015 and October 2016 overflows, but a section of the 2015 overflow is visible on the south (upper edge) of Halema‘uma‘u crater floor. At the time of the flight, multiple spattering sites were active around the margin of the lava lake, and the lake surface was a few meters (yards) below the rim.
For the past month and a half the crater floor of Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō has been experiencing ongoing uplift, which has generated cracks on the crater floor. These cracks are cutting through both recent crater floor lava flows (darker) and the older flows.
On Kīlauea Volcano's East Rift Zone, the perched lava pond in Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō's west pit remains active. Additional overflows of the pond levees have been slowly filling the bottom of the west pit and raising the floor.
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