Qualla: Kilauea https://qualla.com/kilauea en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:09 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/8/e/3/w/kilauea-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Kilauea https://qualla.com/kilauea Kilauea: Introduction https://qualla.com/kilauea/ Photo credit incidencematrix, CC BY 2.0. In 1990, lava swallowed the town of Kalapana whole. Houses, a church, a store, a community center -- all buried under meters of basalt in a matter of weeks. Residents had time to evacuate, but not to save what they had built. Kilauea did not pause. It has been doing this for at least 200,000 years, and its most recent eruption, which began in December 2024, sent lava fountains over 450 meters into the Hawaiian sky. This is the most active volcano on Earth, and it sits on the southeastern shore of Hawaii's Big Island like a slow-motion engine of creation and destruction.

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Image: incidencematrix | CC BY 2.0

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/e/3/w/kilauea-wp/8e3w-kilauea-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Kilauea: Born from a Hotspot https://qualla.com/kilauea/ Photo credit TimBray, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kilauea is the second-youngest product of the Hawaiian hotspot, the stationary plume of magma deep in the Earth's mantle over which the Pacific Plate drifts. The volcano grew above sea level roughly 100,000 years ago and is the current eruptive center of the Hawaiian-Emperor seam...

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Image: TimBray | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/e/3/w/kilauea-wp/8e3w-kilauea-born-from-a-hotspot.mp3 0:06 2 full Kilauea: A Lake of Fire and Its Witnesses https://qualla.com/kilauea/ Photo credit Judebc, CC BY-SA 4.0. When British missionary William Ellis reached the summit in 1823, he found a vast lake of molten lava churning inside the caldera. Mark Twain visited in 1866 and described the spectacle in terms that read more like revelation than travelogue. For much of the 19th century, the lav...

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Image: Judebc | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/e/3/w/kilauea-wp/8e3w-kilauea-a-lake-of-fire-and-its-witnesses.mp3 0:06 3 full Kilauea: The 2018 Reckoning https://qualla.com/kilauea/ Photo credit Jos-uit-boston at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. In May 2018, the volcano's plumbing shifted. Magma drained from the summit lava lake and erupted through two dozen fissures in the lower Puna district, 40 kilometers downslope. Rivers of lava poured into the ocean in three places. Hawaii's largest natural freshwater lake, Green L...

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Image: Jos-uit-boston at Dutch Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/e/3/w/kilauea-wp/8e3w-kilauea-the-2018-reckoning.mp3 0:06 4 full Kilauea: Pele's Domain https://qualla.com/kilauea/ Photo credit Public domain. Native Hawaiians understood Kilauea long before Western science arrived. The volcano is the home of Pele, goddess of fire, and Hawaiian oral histories record eruptions with striking precision. The name Kilauea itself likely means "spewing" or "much spreading," referring to the la...

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Image: Public domain

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/e/3/w/kilauea-wp/8e3w-kilauea-peles-domain.mp3 0:06 5 full Kilauea: The Volcano That Never Rests https://qualla.com/kilauea/ Photo credit Beeblebrox, CC BY-SA 4.0. Since the 2018 eruption, Kilauea has continued to erupt in pulses. A water lake formed in the emptied crater in 2019, only to be boiled away by a new eruption in December 2020. Further eruptions followed in 2021, 2022, 2023, and again in December 2024, with episodic lava fountain...

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Image: Beeblebrox | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/e/3/w/kilauea-wp/8e3w-kilauea-the-volcano-that-never-rests.mp3 0:06 6 full