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An explosive landscape – Metro US

An explosive landscape

The largest and southernmost of the Hawaiian islands is shaking, spitting, and stretching as it slowly expands into the ocean. You’ll see and feel reminders of this almost everywhere during a trip to Hawaii Island, which most locals call the Big Island.

On the southern shore, streams of lava pour into the ocean where they form new land. In some neighbourhoods, you’ll see fields of black, cooled lava that have poured from Kilauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes in recent decades.

Sometimes the ground shakes as gravity pulls on the accumulated piles of lava. But don’t let a fear of tremors prevent you from visiting: the vast majority of these earthquakes are far too weak to feel. Big earthquakes measuring magnitude 6 or more tend to only hit the state about once a decade.

Volcanoes have been central to stories told by Hawaiians for centuries. Legend says the volcano goddess Pele dug fire pits as she travelled from island to island looking for a home with her brothers and sisters.

She finally settled at Kilauea’s summit, where she lives at Halemaumau crater. It’s said that Pele stomps on the floor of her fire pit when she wants to summon lava, hot rocks, steam and smoke.

You can see for yourself how Pele’s lava is building the Big Island if you visit now. Kilauea volcano has been erupting simultaneously in two places for over a year, something that’s unprecedented in 200 years of its recorded history.

The first of these eruptions has been spilling lava across the southern part of the Big Island since 1983, swallowing roads, homes and even entire towns. Fresh flows from this eruption are currently slithering into the ocean near Kalapana, a formerly robust town that was mostly buried in lava in 1990.

Kilauea is also erupting from Halemaumau crater at the summit. That’s where a large explosion opened a vent in March 2008, leading to the daily release of hundreds of tons of sulphur dioxide. Kilauea has spit small fragments of lava from Halemaumau but hasn’t released any lava flows from here.

You can watch the summit eruption from a lookout point inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. It’s humbling to see the crater’s gas plume rise hundreds, and sometimes even thousands, of feet into the air from a vent larger than a football field.

From the visitor’s centre inside the park, you can join ranger-guided hikes to see cinder cones and now-solidified lava lakes created by previous eruptions. Some of the walks meander through rainforests. Visitors can even venture into an old lava tube — a tunnel through which lava once streamed. Getting near flowing lava can be dangerous, so it is vital that visitors follow guidelines set by the national park and Hawaii County.

Few other places on Earth have a hotspot forming new land. One is the North Atlantic, where a small island called Surtsey grew off the southern coast of Iceland in the 1960s.

Hawaii volcanoes

• Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, nps.gov/havo. The site will give you the latest information about where the lava is flowing into the sea, and what the summit eruption is doing. It also has information on hiking and camping within the park. The park is located on Hawaii’s Big Island.

• Round-trip flights from Honolulu to Hilo, the nearest city, run frequently throughout the day, take about 45 minutes, and can be booked for about $100 US. There are also some direct flights to Kailua-Kona, a city on the west side of the Big Island, from Los Angeles, San Francisco and a few other mainland cities.

• The Big Island has limited public transportation so renting a car is your best option for getting around and exploring the island.

• Official Hawaii tourism site: www.gohawaii.com.