With the latest Kilauea eruption on pause, geologists are monitoring the volcano to determine what will happen next.
David Phillips, deputy scientist-in-charge for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, said the eruption, which ceased on Tuesday 61 days after it started on Jan. 5, still might technically not be over.
“We’re calling it a pause for now,” Phillips said. “We still don’t know for sure that it’s ended. It could still resume sometime soon.”
Phillips said there is no longer any liquid lava at Halema‘uma‘u Crater, and that researchers have detected no significant activity around Kilauea’s rift zones.
The eruption began to wind down on Feb. 17, Phillips said, when Kilauea’s summit underwent a significant deflationary period, leading to diminished output over the following weeks. During that time, he said, the summit had mild cycles of inflation and deflation, but didn’t reach the same level of inflation as it had before the Feb. 17 deflation.
But, on Tuesday, Phillips said the summit inflated back to the Feb. 17 level, and the eruption petered out entirely.
“We’re right at the cusp of getting a better idea of what’s next,” Phillips said, but added the eruption could resume within days, weeks or months — and it’s difficult to predict which.
The eruption has been relatively brief compared to others since 2020, which Phillips said marked the beginning of Kilauea’s current phase of eruptive activity. Beginning in December 2020, Kilauea erupted until May 2021, when the volcano fell silent until September of that year, when it began erupting anew until December 2022.
“Pauses were pretty common in the 2021 eruption,” Phillips said. “It would do this cycle of pause, resume, pause, resume so much that we could just about predict when they were going to happen.”
Phillips added that there is some debate among geologists whether the latest eruption was a standalone event, or was a mere continuation of the eruption that began September 2021.
“We’ve been calling it a new one, because there was a dramatic increase in eruptive activity when it began, compared to December (2022),” Phillips said. “Also, the lava at the crater was from a different place … it broke out a little more to the east.
“Twenty years from now, we could look back and classify it as just part of the 2021 eruption,” Phillips went on. “But, for now we’re saying that the one that started on Jan. 5 was a new eruption.”
When the 2021 eruption ended in December 2022, it did so within a day of the eruption of Mauna Loa, the first eruption of that volcano in 38 years, also stopping. Phillips said the close timing of those events was striking, considering that there is no known direct connection between the volcanoes’ inner workings, and added that there have been no changes observed at Mauna Loa.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.