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When it rains, lava pours

Early 2018 saw unusually heavy rainfall in Hawaii. Modelling now suggests that groundwater pressure increased owing to rainfall: this might have triggered changes in the eruption of the island’s Kīlauea volcano.
  1. Michael Manga

    1. Michael Manga is in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720-4767, USA.

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The most recent eruption of Kīlauea volcano on the island of Hawaii began in 1983. For 35 years, most of its magma emerged from a set of fissures in the volcano called the upper east rift zone. But on 3 May 2018, Kīlauea’s lower east rift zone opened up, giving way to a massive outpouring of lava that devastated the southeastern part of the island1 (Fig. 1). An important question is why this change occurred in May 2018, rather than earlier or later in the course of the eruption. Writing in Nature, Farquharson and Amelung2 propose that record-breaking levels of rainfall in early 2018 increased groundwater pressures which, in turn, made it easier for rock to break and hence magma to rise to the surface at new locations.

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Nature 580, 457-458 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01091-4

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