LANL scientists monitoring Kilauea eruption at distance
Distant researchers can improve safety of those on the ground
If you are a scientist interested in the ongoing eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano you don’t have be there ducking the dangerous lava “splatter bombs” and avoiding toxic gases to almost get the full effect.
Los Alamos National Laboratory seismologist Charlotte Rowe has studied volcanoes around the world and has visited Kilauea twice. What’s happening there this month, she said, is riveting, even for scientists thousands of miles away.
“I’m liking the fact that I can — just like everybody else in the world — I can see these phenomena in near real time without having to physically go there and dodge out of the way of falling debris,” Rowe said with a chuckle in a telephone interview.
The images from Hawaii are dramatic, with blue flames shooting through cracks in the pavement and fountains of lava flowing in the background. Methane gas can seep through cracks distant from the lava and can also cause explosions when it’s ignited while trapped underground.
Scientists and observers far from the eruption site can be essential in augmenting safety, said Rowe.
“I like the fact that it’s possible more and more to monitor remotely,” she said. Some scientists are keeping tabs on the eruption from afar to alert those on the scene of danger, especially geologists who may be in very close.
Molten lava from the eruption, which started May 3, has overtaken almost 50 buildings, including dozens of homes, and forced 2,000 people to evacuate from Leilani Estates and surrounding neighborhoods. It injured a man whose leg was shattered when he was hit by a flying “splatter bomb” — a piece of lava that can weigh as much as a refrigerator.
When groundwater contacts lava it can react explosively, as seen in images last week when the lava flowed into the ocean.
“When it [lava] interacts with the water you get explosions just like when you pour anything hot on water or if you pour water into something hot like a frying pan full of oil — it will spatter all over the place and send bits of oil out to burn you,” said Rowe.
Additional hazards occur when the lava hits the sea, said LANL’s Steven Love, a physicist and remote-sensing scientist. The lava generates clouds composed of hydrochloric acid droplets and fine particles of volcanic glass forming a lava haze called “laze,” which can cause breathing problems and eye irritation, he said in an email.
Love’s team at Los Alamos is building an ultraminiaturized high-resolution camera called a hyperspectral imager, to help scientists spot potential future volcanic eruptions from far above Earth. The camera, with all its supporting systems, is smaller than a loaf of bread and is expected to be launched next year in a new class of tiny satellites called CubeSat.
While current satellites can image large-scale events like the Kilauea eruption and track plumes of sulfur dioxide over thousands of miles, the small satellites are meant to “be able to spot the initial, small-scale, lowlevel sulfur dioxide emissions at just-awakened volcanoes that could be harbingers of eruptive activity to come,” said Love.
Each camera pixel records brightness over a wide color spectrum and can detect “distinctive spectral ‘fingerprints’ for several important gases, including volcanic sulfur dioxide,” Love said. The satellites are inexpensive to launch and would typically be a “hitchhiker” on rockets carrying larger payloads into space.
Closer to home, Valles Caldera in the Jemez Mountains is still considered an active volcano and was formed about a million years in explosive eruptions, but Rowe said its last eruption was about 40,000 years ago. The Los Alamos Seismic Network, in place since the 1980s, monitors seismic activity in the area.
Despite the loss of property from the Hawaii eruption, Rowe sees an upside.
“It’s a teachable moment,” she said. “It will extend to the public just being better educated about hazards and about the kind of things they should pay attention to and the general excitement of the natural world.”