August 8, 2024: Monitoring Volcanic Eruptions in Hawai‘i

The Island of Hawai‘i is one of the most volcanically active places on Earth with its most recent eruption occurring on June 3, 2024. This eruption took place in the Southwest Rift Zone of Kīlauea which had not erupted since 1974. There are a multitude of ways to monitor and research volcanic eruptions such as seismicity, petrology, gas emissions, and surface deformation.
In this session, a team from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory will demonstrate what a day in the life of a petrologist, a scientist who studies how rocks form, looks like using the 2024 eruption. They will take participants through the process of collecting samples in the field, processing them in the lab, and then preparing them for geochemical analyses.
This work offers a window into the magmatic plumbing system that is underlying Kīlauea and provides a better understanding of how and why volcanoes erupt.