Gepubliceerd op 4 mei 2020
The notion that rain could lead to a volcanic eruption may seem strange, but scientists from the University of Miami in the USA, have used information from satellites, including the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, to discover that a period of heavy rainfall may have triggered the four month-long eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano in 2018.
Producing about 320 000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of lava that reshaped the landscape, destroyed hundreds of homes and caused the collapse of the summit caldera, the 2018 eruption was one of the most destructive in Kilauea’s recorded history.
Restless Kilauea
A paper published recently in Nature proposes a new model to explain why this eruption happened. The authors, Jamie Farquharson and Falk Amelung from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science, suggest that heavy rainfall may have been the culprit.