HAWAII – Field engineers at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory are occasionally forced to travel across the grounds of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park in a rather unique manner. As we see in the video below, while walking amongst the frothy pumice found southwest of the two eruptive vents in Halema’uma’u, HVO field engineers use snowshoes to stay atop rather than sinking through.
In this closed area of Hawi’i Volcanoes National Park, tiny pieces of volcanic glasw can be seen shimmering in the air. To protect themselves from these “tephra” particles the engineers wear full-face respirators.
These engineers maintain nearly 150 monitoring instruments on Kīlauea, tracking activity above and below the surface. The ongoing high fountain eruption episodes in Halemaʻumaʻu have presented these new challenges to maintaining parts of this monitoring network, especially near and immediately downwind of the eruptive vents.
Several monitoring stations that were located in areas too close to lava flows or areas buried by falling tephra have been moved, with some areas closest to the vents seeing tephra as think as 80 feet. KÄ«lauea has been frequently seeing episodic eruptions within the summit caldera since December 23rd, 2024.
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