Hawaii scientists closely monitoring seismic activity spike at Kilauea volcano

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – For the last week, scientists have been keeping an especially close eye on seismic activity at Kilauea.

No eruption is underway, but a big jump in earthquakes over the last several days has experts wondering what could happen next.

The latest seismic spike stretches back to last Friday.

U.S. Geological Survey Scientist-in-charge Ken Hon says his team tracked 500 earthquakes in the first six hours and since then, there have been over 3,000.

“We had field crews out who were reporting rockfalls off of the southside of Halemaumau, felt a lot of earthquakes, heard a lot of noises,” Hon explained.

“So it really sounded like things were really primed. That’s the kind of stuff that happens before an eruption and then it shifted kind of back over to the south end of the caldera.”

The shockwaves stretch from Halemaumau Crater down through the southwest rift zone. Hon describes it as a by-product of infusion, where magma is moving underground and shifting rock.

“I guess you can think of it like a deck of cards that you pull across,” Hon said.

“There’s some space there, but it’s like on tiny fractures. So when the magma comes in, it can kind of push all the rocks together like a deck of cards and make room for itself down there.”

Despite the spike in activity, Hon says it’s not an indicator that an eruption is imminent.

“We’re not really sure what it’s going to do,” Hon said.

“We have to have the pressure to put that upwards and out of the fractures and also push those fractures apart. It’s just this compressible space versus magmatic pressure versus surface weakness that’s going on. Those are things that we can’t possibly measure.”

In this case, if lava does eventually break through, Hon says it would remain within the park boundaries. “All the activity so far shows that any possible eruption will either be confined to the summit or an area out around the southwest rift zone of Kilauea,” Hon said. “Unpopulated areas, no infrastructure out there, so we don’t expect any impact on the surrounding communities.”

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