Kilauea summit started erupting again last week - adding fresh lava to the crater floor a couple dozen meters deep, and it's still going although at a reduced level. FULL SCREEN this video, you won't be disappointed!
I want to say that the footage of the helicopter and scientists at the end of the video is SUPER interesting to me. From the very beginning of all of this activity a couple of years ago - staring with the lower Puna eruption that led to the collapse of the original Halemaʻumaʻu crater floor, and then the 2020 summit eruption that slowly filled it almost all the way back up with lava - we've mostly seen these large wide-angle images and videos, and you see rocks and cliffs and things in the pictures but none of it tells you how "big" any of it is.
Like, remember this time back after the crater floor collapse but before it started filling with lava again, when this kinda scummy looking pond started growing down at the bottom of the collapsed crater?
But you can look at that photo all you want and you're never going to "see" how big that water is. I could TELL you, for example, and accurately, that at its depth in that photo, if the Statue of Liberty was standing at the very bottom of that pond its torch would not reach the surface of the water, and you would understand what I was saying but it wouldn't change the fact that in the photo it still LOOKS like a little puddle at the bottom of a hole that seems maybe kinda big but not, like, awesomely big.
But at the end of that video up there it's the first time I've ever seen actual humans juxtaposed against the crater floor in the background and the fact that we know for certain how big humans are, finally makes it impossible to not see just how impossibly freaking HUGE even the small part of the lava lake that can be seen behind them actually is. I love it!
