New research of the 2018 Kilauea volcano revealed a paradigm on friction in earthquake faults, which could potentially help create hazard assessments and mitigation efforts in future volcanic eruptions.
The Big Island is formed by five volcanoes: Kohala, Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, Hualalai and Kilauea.
Kilauea is somewhere between 210,000 and 280,000 years old, and it's thought to have risen above sea level about 100,000 years ago, according to Wikipedia.
On April 30, 2018, Current Science Daily reports that lava unexpectedly drained from a crater in Kilauea that had been brewing lava for more than 30 years.
This resulted in the floor of the crater bottoming out and in a span of just three months. "Kilauea spat out enough lava to fill 320,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, destroyed more than 700 homes and displaced thousands of people. The summit landscape itself was transformed as its crater collapsed by as much as 1,500 feet throughout the summer in a way that scientists are only beginning to understand," Current Science Daily Reported.
Historically, it is the most active volcano on the Big Island. The most recent eruption began on December 20, 2020, and stopped on May 23 of this year, according to Wikipedia.
“In the entire 60 years of modern geophysical instrumentation of volcanoes, we’ve had only half a dozen caldera collapses,” Stanford University geophysicist Paul Segall told Current Science Daily. A caldera is a volcanic crater that has a diameter many times that of the vent and is formed by collapse of the central part of a volcano.
Since different surfaces create different reactions to friction, it's still hard for scientists to predict how something will react in different scenarios.
“One of the big challenges in earthquake science has been to take these friction laws and the values that were found in the laboratory, and apply them to, say, the San Andreas Fault, because it’s such an enormous jump in scale,” Segall said, according to Current Science Daily.
Segall conducted the study with U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Kyle Anderson, and the duo found that for an eruption like Kilauea, which had an eruption vent at a lower elevation, it results in a larger pressure block under the caldera block. This means that the volcano bottoming out is more likely, and if that happens, the weight of the caldera block holds pressure over the magma, which forces it to erupt.
“Improving our understanding of the physics governing caldera collapses will help us to better understand the conditions under which collapses are possible and forecast the evolution of a collapse sequence once it begins,” Anderson told Current Science Daily.