[Rockhounds] Stanford scientists test friction laws in the collapsing crater of an erupting volcano

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

On April 30, 2018, on the eastern flank of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano, lava
suddenly drained from a crater that had been spewing lava for more than
three decades. Then the floor of the crater, named Pu’u’ō’ō, dropped out.

Within 48 hours, the lava lake at Kīlauea’s summit 12 miles northwest of
Pu’u’ō’ō began to fall as magma drained into the volcano’s plumbing. Soon,
new cracks opened 12 miles east of Pu’u’ō’ō and molten lava spurted out,
crept over roads, burned trees and torched power poles.

Over three months, Kīlauea 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.

“In the entire 60 years of modern geophysical instrumentation of volcanoes,
we’ve had only half a dozen caldera collapses,” said Stanford University
geophysicist Paul Segall <https://profiles.stanford.edu/paul-segall>, lead
author of a new study in *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*
<https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101469118> that helps explain how these
events unfold and finds evidence confirming the reigning scientific
paradigm for how friction works on earthquake faults.

The results may help to inform future hazard assessments and mitigation
efforts around volcanic eruptions. “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,” said co-author Kyle Anderson, PhD ’12,
a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey who was part of the team
working on-site at Kīlauea during the 2018 eruption.

https://news.stanford.edu/2021/07/28/giant-friction-experiment-kilauea-volcano/