Kilauea and Pele

Kilauea was in nearly continuous eruption from nineteen eighty-three until that long eruption ended in two thousand eighteen, one of the longest uninterrupted volcanic eruptions in recorded history. It has erupted again in shorter episodes since twenty twenty. The lava flows from its east rift zone reached the ocean coast in waves across those decades, adding new land to the Big Island. In twenty eighteen, the lower East Rift Zone erupted through a residential neighborhood called Leilani Estates, sending fissures through suburban streets, destroying about seven hundred homes, and covering more than thirteen square miles with fresh lava. Within a year, new land had formed where the ocean had been.

In Western volcanology, Kilauea is described as a shield volcano, built by successive flows of low-viscosity basaltic lava over hundreds of thousands of years. The summit caldera is a nested depression; the current eruption site at Halemaumau is a lake of molten rock that fluctuates in depth and activity. The geology is precise and well-documented.

In Hawaiian tradition, Kilauea is the home of Pele, the goddess whose family history encodes the geological history of the Hawaiian chain. Pele was driven from the north, legend says, driven from island to island by her sister, the sea. She found her permanent home at Kilauea, which is the youngest and most active of the volcanoes in the chain, as the Pacific Plate carries the islands northwestward over the hot spot and eventually extinguishes them. The chain of underwater seamounts extending northwest of Kauai are the drowned remains of older islands. Pele follows the hot spot. In this sense, the legend and the geology agree on the direction.

The park that surrounds Kilauea and Mauna Loa was established in nineteen sixteen and is a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage Site. To stand at the caldera rim at night, when the glow from the lava lake reflects off the steam clouds above it, is to watch land being made in real time.