Check Out These Jaw-Dropping Photographs Of Kīlauea’s Ongoing Eruption

After some tell-tale rumbling in the weeks before, Hawai’i’s Kīlauea volcano burst into life on December 20. Having engaged in quite the prolific eruption for several months back in 2018 – a grand finale, of sorts, to a 35-year-long multi-part eruption – scientists weren’t quite expecting it to get going again so soon after it shut down its lava factor in August of that year. And yet, after two-year-ish snooze, lava began pouring out of the walls of Halema‘uma‘u, the pit crater in the volcano’s bowl-shaped summit, like it was going out of fashion, creating a lava lake that could stick around for days, weeks, months…or, like its predecessor, years. As of today, it’s 663 feet deep and still filling up.

Lava in Halema‘uma‘u has come and gone over the centuries, sometimes hanging about as a persistent lake of molten rock. Until 2008, one had been absent since an explosive-laden eruption in 1924 pulled the plug from beneath it. Then, after a ten-year residency, the most recent one drained away from view back in May 2018, early on during the 2018 eruption sequence; magma at the summit fed profuse lava fountains and rivers on the volcano’s lower eastern flanks.

Being an utterly wonderful and relatively safe way to see the world’s freshest lava – lava lakes are essentially the roofs of magma chambers – volcanologists are understandably thrilled about this eruption, which for now looks to be contained to the summit. But because we’ve all been distracted by, well, everything that’s happening at the moment, I don’t think we’ve taken the time to appreciate just how remarkable it is to see some of the planet’s youngest land being made right before our eyes. So with that in mind, here are some of the most spectacular shots of the ongoing eruption, all taken by various members of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.