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Kilauea erupts, destroying webcam [video]
- shevy-java 11mo agoPretty cool - that looks like two or three eruption holes. Now someone timejump to krakatau, year 1883 ...
- embedding-shape 11mo agoIf we're lucky, we (humanity) get to experience another supervolcano eruption sometime in the future, and then we'll finally get some good content out of it.
- avalys 11mo agoPersonally I’m looking forward to a nearby supernova or giant meteor impact!
- smartbit 11mo agoHow about waiting for a Geomagnetic reversal? They happen on average every .45M years, the last one .78M years ago, big chance one happing anytime now :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
- stevenhubertron 11mo agoThat arcing of the lava really is something to behold. The pressures to push molten rock like that are impressive.
- 867-5309 11mo agoicy what you did there
- asdfman123 11mo agoIt's just the weight of literally everything on the planet pushing down, as well as miles of rock :)
- louthy 11mo ago“just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there ;)
- lisper 11mo agoLiterally! :-)
- praptak 11mo agoIndirectly. The actual spike of pressure that ejects the magma comes from the gasses dissolved therein. When the magma moves up, the pressure drops and the gasses become oversaturated and thus prone to violent release.
- asdfman123 11mo agoThe gas bubbles result form when pressure is reduced, like you mention. So there's actually less pressure near the surface, it's just more erratically applied. The pressure of the earth's subsurface is proving the animating force.
- wanderingstan 11mo agoIndeed. I just wish we could get a better sense of the scale, which is always hard in nature shots devoid of trees or human structures. A productive use of AI would be to place some houses and automobiles in the video for scale.
- whyage 11mo agoHawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park is absolutely stunning (and safe, away from the closed area). It's like being on a different planet. If you haven't been to the Big Island and the park, you should add it to your bucket list.
- magicalhippo 11mo agoSadly there was an ongoing eruption when me and my SO visited the Big Island, so the entire park was closed. Was a bit bummed out, on the other hand people lost their homes so keeping it in perspective. That said, I second visiting the Big Island and visit various sites. Driving less than an hour and going from barren volcanic landscapes to lush rainforests was something else, and watching the sunset from Mauna Kea was magical. And lots of great beaches, and most that weren't next to a resort had very few people. While the island is big relative to the other Hawaiian islands, its small enough that you can drive around it in a day. I'd recommend staying on the Kona side, which is the dry and somewhat barren side. The Hilo side has rainforests for a reason.
- shevy-java 11mo agoA university professor here visits many areas. He complained by far the most of the dust in the air that stuck around for quite a while there.
- skybrian 11mo agoThe Big Island has good B&B's in many parts of the island so I recommend staying in multiple places, to see the local sights without a long drive afterwards.
- DavidPeiffer 11mo agoWhat struck me about the big island is that it has 8 of the 13 climate zones, and you can go around the perimeter of the island in about 5 hours. I loved going up Mauna Kea visitor center and stargazing. At ~11,000 feet, it's one of the best places in the world for naked eye stargazing. You're literally above the clouds, the island has strict rules about exterior lights at night to minimize light pollution, and you're above the thickest air. I wasn't expecting to see the Milky Way so easily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#/media/File:Milky_Way_Night_Sky_Black_Rock_Desert_Nevada.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#/media/File:Milky_Wa...
- Mistletoe 11mo agoThe final moments of the webcam were even better than I had hoped.
- qingcharles 11mo agoThat thing took a licking and kept on ticking.
- hnburnsy 11mo agoUSGC live stream https://m.youtube.com/usgs/live https://m.youtube.com/usgs/live
- hnburnsy 11mo agoLooks like the camera and stream are still active... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BqmpkUdMtyA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BqmpkUdMtyA
- reincarnate0x14 11mo agoThey have three cameras, well, had three. The south rim camera (v3) was overrun by the eruption at about 0957 local time, you can rewind the stream and watch its final moments.
- yuliyp 11mo agoStarting at 9:46 is when it goes from wow to WOW. The last 2 minutes in particular are incredible, including the bizarre artifacts in the last 15 seconds before the stream dies.
- omnicognate 11mo agoThis was incredible to watch, and I have to chuckle at this title. It's obvious why the webcam matters, with people round the world watching, but the destruction of a webcam is such a tiny thing in comparison to the eruption itself it's strangely funny.
- DonHopkins 11mo agoWould be nice to have a mobile phone live streaming webcam viewer that vibrates when the webcam is destroyed!
- jcranmer 11mo agoKilauea is more or less constantly erupting. This is the 38th eruptive episode since in the past year: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/science/eruption-information https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/science/eruption-info... (note that the 38th episode started a few hours ago as of this message). Although this is still considered "one" eruption by USGS.
- nickpsecurity 11mo agoThe threat level for airplanes is set to orange... for anyone dumb enough to fly over an erupting volcano. The orange flying from the ground would be all the motivation I need to stay clear of it. It was an awesome video, though.
- mschuster91 11mo ago> The threat level for airplanes is set to orange... for anyone dumb enough to fly over an erupting volcano. Even 180km away from the eruption, airplanes can be seriously damaged [1]. Jet engines really, really do not like to ingest anything else than air and, maybe, a tad bit of water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009
- avalys 11mo agoVolcanic ash is particularly bad because it is so abrasive, having been freshly formed without any opportunity for erosion to smooth it down like regular dust.
- duskwuff 11mo agoThat's not the only problem - volcanic ash also has a low enough melting point that it'll melt in the combustion chamber of a jet engine and leave glassy deposits on cooler components.
- euroderf 11mo agoPrevailing winds are key. Reykjavíkings told me that during that big eruption many moons ago, all traffic to Europe was ended but traffic to North American continued merrily along.
- jcranmer 11mo agoAn erupting volcano can spew ash over a large distance. When Eya.... that Icelandic volcano (that's hard to spell because I don't know Icelandic) erupted several years ago, the ash cloud traveled far enough to disrupt travel over most of Europe for a few days.
- accrual 11mo agoIt's wild to see this footage safely behind a monitor. Kind of macabre to ponder but I wonder if the victims of Pompeii had a similar experience. The last we see is a hailstorm of ash and molten lava raining down then signal lost.
- toss1 11mo agoiirc, Pompeii was a pyroclastic flow [0], a fast-moving current of hot gas and volcanic matter with speeds between 100-700 km/hr and temperatures up to 1000°C. So, probably something like that, but a lot bigger, faster, and arriving faster from further away. I was surprised how long the camera lasted getting buried. It'd be a not good end. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroclastic_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroclastic_flow
- fsckboy 11mo agoi just posted a sister comment to yours about the Mt St Helens explosion, with a picture from 1980, and then i noticed that they are calling (it's a non technical article) what rained down in the photograph onto the camera and photographer "pyroclastic flow" and it looks very similar to what happened here.
- db48x 11mo agoThis is not a pyroclastic flow and doesn’t look even remotely similar. The problem is that you’re comparing a very close up image of some lava falling on a camera to videos taken from tens of miles away from Mt St Helens. The scale and nature of the event are completely different. Weirdly if you are going to be hit by a pyroclastic flow then it won’t be moving across your field of view at all. It’ll just be getting bigger and angrier–looking for the minute or two that you have left in your life.
- pixl97 11mo agohttps://youtu.be/T02pJdKARLo?si https://youtu.be/T02pJdKARLo?si This is what a pyroclastic flow looks like.
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- clbrmbr 11mo agoWhen I walked across the crater as a kid, I remember there was an inner crater that I was told had filled up with lava back in the 80s and then drained down leaving a deep well. Does someone have a map of the historical eruption locations within the main summit crater?
- jcranmer 11mo agoUSGS has a page on the history of Kilauea here: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/science/geology-and-history-kilauea https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/science/geology-and-h..., which also has some links on some of the eruptions in recorded history. Probably the closest thing to what you're looking for is here: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/kilauea-caldera-simplified-geologic-map-monthyear-labels-lava https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/kilauea-caldera-simplified..., which lists the age of the most recent lave flows as of 2008 (when Halema'uma'u started filling up again). The 2018 eruption caused another caldera collapse within the crater, enlarging Halema'uma'u and creating a new mini-caldera that's labeled as the "down-dropped block" in subsequent maps, e.g. https://www.usgs.gov/maps/october-5-2021-kilauea-summit-eruption-reference-map https://www.usgs.gov/maps/october-5-2021-kilauea-summit-erup... ... although, since then, Halema'uma'u has erupted enough lava to more or less fill the entire down-dropped block, see, e.g., the most recent map: https://www.usgs.gov/maps/november-25-2025-kilauea-summit-eruption-reference-map https://www.usgs.gov/maps/november-25-2025-kilauea-summit-er...
- alex_young 11mo agoHere’s a video I took of an eruption in June: https://youtu.be/BGOSSNy1hN0?si=MIFkW7MkRDxJ5tUr https://youtu.be/BGOSSNy1hN0?si=MIFkW7MkRDxJ5tUr
- quotemstr 11mo agoI'd love to learn more about the specific failure mode towards the end. As the eruption debris approach the camera, we see glowing rock up close. The camera then flashes purple for some reason, goes black, then returns to streaming for a few more seconds, recording a vague orange glow. After that, it's gone for good.
- zootboy 11mo agoA little bit of educated guessing on my part: The purple frames have a bunch of gradients to white, which looks a lot like what happens when the infrared filter on most color cameras is removed and a bunch of IR light is shone into then. For some reason the green cells are less sensitive to IR, which results in a purple-ish hue. So in this case, perhaps the lava striking the camera melted through the lens holder and shifted the IR filter out of place, or is just able to shine intense IR light into the gap between the filter and the sensor. In those same frames, the dark areas with noisy borders are I believe an artifact of the CMOS sensor digitization process when cells get strongly overwhelmed. I've seen the same patterns on cameras where an extremely intense light (e.g. a laser pointer) is shone into them. It's like the cells get so overwhelmed they roll around back to zero. The amorphous shapes at the very end are clearly from the lens being totally detached / moved out of position, allowing defocused light to hit the sensor. I didn't spot any interesting sensor or encoder death frames before the video ends, so likely the lava severed the ethernet cable or destroyed the electronics at that point.
- emmelaich 11mo agoI had a look at the crater using Google maps. Does this user contributed photo look AI to anyone? Or at least 'shopped. https://maps.app.goo.gl/or6gj5XnTCTwv4Ys7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/or6gj5XnTCTwv4Ys7
- pimlottc 11mo agoIt’s not real, lava has not flowed into the ocean for many years.
- AstroNutt 11mo agoNothing looks right. The waterfall of lava to the caldera. How do you get magma ring above a non erupting caldera? It's 100% fake.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- csomar 11mo agoAre these giant buildings over there? Would be easy to check their existence (though the photo could be real but the lava is not)
- jcranmer 11mo agoThat photo is pretty clearly fake. * The steam from lava should be arising from where the lava hits the lava, boiling it--there's not going to be any steam from the interior of a lava tube, because all of the water will have boiled out long ago. * It looks like somebody dumped a photo of a black rock field on top of a different image. There's a sploch of a normal tan-sand beach at the base of part of this cliffs; in recent lava activity, the lava will extend fully into the ocean and collapse. Given that the edge of the lava is a) pretty towering and yet b) some distance from the sea. * The lava activity in the extreme foreground is pretty sketchy. It's not entirely implausible to have lava flowing into a pit like that in some fashion, but there's also no clear source from the lava, and real Hawaiian lava flows tend to look somewhat different than that. * Lava flows downhill from a rift zone. Where's the rift zone here? It's basically a wall of black rock. Photogammetry is not my strong suit, but the presumably dried lava is towering above the treetops in the distance, and yet there's no clear sense of where the lava is flowing from. * In the background, you see something more akin to a stratovolcano (actually, might well be an eroded granite dike or some other weird formation like that as opposed to a volcano in the first place). Hawaiian volcanoes are shield volcanoes, they don't look like that. Also, Kilauea and Mauna Loa are too active to really have the deeply-eroded look like that. You have to go to Kohala on the Big Island to get that kind of look. * Kilauea is nowhere near the ocean. (Also, shield volcano, you can't see the top from the base.) * There's another island clearly visible in the background. None of the Hawaiian islands are close enough to each other to generally be visible from one another! And certainly not from any view of Kilauea, which is the last volcano in the chain that's above sea level. (Loihi still has another 3,000 feet to go before it pokes above the surface.)
- ak681443 11mo agoA new entei has been born?
- 333c 11mo agoThe AI narration was off-putting, but the video footage was cool.
- iamtedd 11mo agoThat is not AI. The same voice narrates at least two years ago. Just scroll down in the channel's video list.
- Deukhoofd 11mo agoThe description of the video states it is in fact AI: > A synthesized text-to-video voiceover was used in the narration for this story.
- asymmetric 11mo agoWhere does it say that? I can’t see it in the video description.
- Loocid 11mo agoThe second line. The video description for me says the following: "HAWAIʻI VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK - An incredible sight at the summit of Kilauea volcano on Saturday morning, as Episode 38 erupted enormous lava fountains across the caldera, destroying one of the webcams that was live streaming the event. All images and video are courtesy the U.S. Geological Survey. A synthesized text-to-video voiceover was used in the narration for this story."
- moffkalast 11mo agoWell it would've been better if they kept the video on the actual camera that ate it instead of switching back and forth constantly. It's not Liam Neeson climbing a fence, guys.
- mlindner 11mo agoJust FYI, but the voice for this channel is AI generated.
- unethical_ban 11mo agoThe toughest thing to realize is that it is not obvious. Other posters here say it's a human, which was my assumption. But I wouldn't bet my savings either way anymore.
- happyopossum 11mo agoSynthetic text-to-speech and “Ai” generated are not the same thing. We’ve been doing TTS for 30 years now - get over it
- unethical_ban 11mo agoWe haven't been doing it in such a way that a person is misled into thinking they are hearing a real human narrator. Yes, that matters. People want to know if what they are looking at or listening to is AI or not.
- louthy 11mo agoMore detailed coverage from Geology Professor Shawn Willsey [1]. He’s a good channel to follow if you’re even slightly interested in geology… [1] https://youtu.be/oc2Pr3YiRO0?si=UJInJ_wLzitdKec8 https://youtu.be/oc2Pr3YiRO0?si=UJInJ_wLzitdKec8
- sedatk 11mo agoI was there today. We happened to notice the smoke over Kilauea while driving to Hilo, then checked out USGS cams, and immediately drove there and spent the next 7 hours getting mesmerized. As my first eruption encounter, I didn’t expect to experience several things like the heat even from a long distance, enough to keep me warm in my shorts at 60F, and the loud rumble, like a giant waterfall. The flow of lava was way faster than I expected too, almost like oil. Mind blown.
- kzrdude 11mo agoHawaii volcanism is what geologists seem to call "nice and friendly" - low viscosity lava, not prone to explosive eruptions (unlike the stratovolcanoes of the Andes or the Pacific rim in general) - this is because it's caused by hotspot volcanism in Hawaii.
- lazide 11mo agoIt’s not nice and friendly because of the hotspot volcanism. It’s because the hotspot has a chemical composition that is generally low in dissolved gasses and very liquid/flows well. (Lots of silicates I think?) It tends to come out nicely and stay liquid as it leaves, so vents don’t plug up. Also, because of the relatively low dissolved gasses, pressure doesn’t spike as high when it’s flowing out of the chamber like many other magmas do, causing explosions. Hawaii exists basically because it’s great for building up islands/mountains without blowing them up as part of the process.
- kzrdude 11mo agoI don't think hotspots can be said to have different composition. But if the hotspot is under a continent or an ocean plate makes a difference for the type of eruptions. Hawaii is in the middle of an ocean plate, no continental crust there. So we get a basaltic eruption (comparatively lower silica content, low viscosity lava).
- s1artibartfast 11mo ago
- egeozcan 11mo agoProbably this amazing capture is worth more than a hundred times the price of the camera, yet the geek in me feels really sad when perfectly functional hardware gets destroyed :)
- georgefrowny 11mo agoDefinitely don't think about how much "nice" equipment is bought, used once or twice and then sits in a cupboard forever until disposed of in a skip when someone dies or a company goes under and the building is cleared. My last place had a whole box full of FPGA dev boards that I would have killed to play with as an undergrad. The real pities are in machining where what looks like a junk heap to the family may actually be a priceless trove of rare tools and irreplaceable machine parts. Not to mention lovingly-made tools and jigs. A physical cousin to unpublished software sitting on a thrown-away hard drive.
- MiddleEndian 11mo agoThink of it like a delicious meal or a grenade. You pay for it to be consumed once, then it's gone.
- andsoitis 11mo agoWorth watching: Into the Inferno, a film by Werner Herzog in which he depicts the relationship between active volcanoes and the humans who live in their shadows.
- GaggiX 11mo ago>A synthesized text-to-video voiceover was used in the narration for this story. I wasn't even realizing it without reading this in the description.
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo agoJust a planet popping a zit.
- seydor 11mo agoThe two events in the title sound so uneven
- cmiles8 11mo agoThe Big Island of Hawaii and the national park there is an amazing place. One of the only places where you can (relatively) safely visit a highly active volcano.