Hawaii volcano again puts tall lava fountains on display in latest eruption episode
HONOLULU — An erupting Hawaii volcano once again began shooting fountains of lava that reached hundreds of feet high on Tuesday.
Fountains reached heights of 400 feet (120 meters) to 500 feet (150 meters) in the early morning hours, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
This marks the 13th episode of on-again, off-again lava activity of Kilauea volcano on the Big Island that started Dec. 23 .
The latest episode didn't last long. Fountaining stopped abruptly in the afternoon, scientists later said.
A webcam showed vigorous fountains of bright-red molten rock and billowing smoke midmorning Tuesday. Hours later, only smoke could be seen.
On Monday afternoon, there were small, sporadic spatter fountains reaching 15 feet (5 meters) to 30 feet (10 meters) high. Spattering continued to increase during the night and into early Tuesday, the observatory said in a status report.
No residential areas have been threatened by the eruption. People have been flocking to the park for views of the fiery show.
Each episode has produced fountains ranging in height, with some reaching 600 feet (180 meters).
The length of time for each fountaining episode has varied from several hours to several days. Episodes have been separated by pauses lasting from less than 24 hours to 12 days, according to the observatory.
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Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
Battle to eradicate invasive pythons in Florida achieves stunning milestone
A startling milestone has been reached in Florida's war against the invasive Burmese pythons eating their way across the Everglades. The Conservancy of Southwest Florida reports it has captured and humanely killed 20 tons of the snakes since 2013, including a record 6,300 pounds of pythons killed this past breeding season, according to a June 9 news release. To put that in perspective, 20 tons — or 40,000 pounds — is a mound of snakes the size of a fire truck ... or a fully loaded city bus. What's startling is those 1,400 snakes didn't come from a statewide culling. They came from a 200-square-mile area in southwestern Florida, the conservancy reports. The greater Everglades ecosystem, where the snakes are thriving, covers more than 7,800 square miles, according to wildlife biologist Ian Bartoszek, the Conservancy Science Project Manager who oversees the python program. It's estimated tens of thousands of pythons are roaming the region, the U.S. Geological Survey says. 'I guess the real question is what did it take in native animals to make 20 tons of python? ... It still amazes me how big these animals get and how many of them are out there,' Bartoszek told McClatchy News in a phone interview. 'Pythons have indeterminate growth and the more they eat, the larger they become. On this project we have captured the largest female by weight at just under 18 (feet) but weighing a massive 215 pounds and the largest male at 16 (feet) and 140 pounds. Their size is a reflection of the available prey base. We probably grow them larger in Southwest Florida because we still have deer and medium-sized mammals for them to prey upon. In portions of the eastern Everglades, it is likely the reverse.' University of Florida researchers have identified 85 species of birds and mammals (including reptiles) that are being eaten by pythons in the Everglades, leading to fears they are decimating some native mammal populations, Bartoszek says. Southwestern Florida's wetlands are like a buffet for pythons, putting the region and the conservancy on the front lines. It's only with the help of technology that the conservancy has gained ground since starting the python program in 2013, Bartoszek says. This includes a scout snake program that fits radio telemetry trackers on 40 male pythons, so they can be tracked to reproductive females during mating season (November through April). Those females are humanely euthanized and the tagged males are freed to track down more females. The program has prevented more than 20,000 python eggs from hatching, the conservancy says. 'Long-term monitoring has shown signs of positive effectiveness of these efforts, as scout snakes increasingly struggle to locate mates or the females they find are smaller in size,' the conservancy says. Bartoszek's team, which includes biologist Ian Easterling, made headlines in 2024 when it walked up on a 115-pound python swallowing a 77-pound deer. That amounted to 66.9% of the snake's body mass and proved they are eating larger prey in Florida. The female python captured and swallowed the live deer in less than an hour, the team concluded. Among the other disconcerting discoveries made: The snakes are expanding their range. They are well established in counties along Florida's southeastern and southwestern coasts and sightings are now being reported near Lake Okeechobee, Bartoszek says. That's about a 110-mile drive northwest from Miami. 'The Burmese python always continues to surprise me and I have an internal memory reel of all the firsts we have seen on the project. The most visceral ones are when we see first hand what they are consuming,' Bartoszek said. 'But those are counterbalanced by seeing native wildlife fighting back, like when we discovered a bobcat that had predated upon one of our scout snakes. Or when we had tracked hatchling pythons over many summers and would eventually be tracking the predators that consumed them, including an endangered eastern Indigo snake. Those feels like wins for the home team when you get to see the Everglades fighting back.' Burmese pythons are native to southeastern Asia, but they began appearing in Florida in the 1970s, according to the South Florida Water Management District. It's suspected the snakes were pets, and they were either released by their owners or escaped captivity, the district says. 'The Burmese python is decimating native wildlife across their invaded range. ... The python team's work of reducing the local population of the invasive snake allows our native wildlife safer conditions to recover,' said Rob Moher, Conservancy of Southwest Florida president and CEO. The Conservancy of Southwest Florida is an environmental organization based in Naples that works to protect natural resources and wildlife in Collier, Lee, Charlotte, Hendry and Glades counties. It collaborates with the U.S. Geological Survey, National Park Service, University of Florida, Florida Fish and Wildlife, South Florida Water Management District, Rookery Bay Research Reserve and Naples Zoo.
San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Study says California is overdue for a major earthquake. Does that mean ‘the big one' is coming?
Unlike other earthquake-prone places around the planet, California is overdue for a major quake, according to a recent study. But that doesn't mean a catastrophic event like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is on the verge of striking. 'A fault's 'overdue' is not a loan payment overdue,' said Lucy Jones, founder of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society and a research associate at the California Institute of Technology, who wasn't part of the work. The new study reported that a large share of California faults have been running 'late,' based on the expected time span between damaging temblors. The researchers compiled a geologic data set of nearly 900 large earthquakes on active faults in Japan, Greece, New Zealand and the western United States, including California. Faults are cracks in the planet's crust, where giant slabs of earth, known as tectonic plates, meet. The Hayward Fault is slowly creeping in the East Bay and moves around 5 millimeters per year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. But sometimes plates get stuck and pressure builds. Earthquakes occur when plates suddenly slip, producing a jolt of energy that causes the ground to shake. Scientists study ruptured rock layers deep beneath the surface to estimate when large earthquakes occurred in the past. In the new study, the authors collected data stretching back tens of thousands of years. For a region spanning the Great Basin to northern Mexico, this paleoearthquake record stretched back about 80,000 years. For California, the record extended back about 5,000 years. The scientists used these records to calculate how much time typically passes between large surface-rupturing earthquakes around the planet. The average interval was around 100 years for some sites on the San Andreas Fault; it was 2,100 years on the less famous Compton thrust fault beneath the Los Angeles area. About 45% of the faults analyzed for California are running behind schedule for a major earthquake, meaning that more time has passed since the last large quake on a fault than the historical average. In the other regions studied, this statistic ranged from 9% to 18%. The researchers' analysis only included large surface-rupturing earthquakes. It didn't include the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, which was below the magnitude 7 threshold that the study authors used for quakes on the San Andreas Fault. The authors associated seismic punctuality with slip rates, or how fast the two sides of a fault move past each other. 'Our analysis showed that the faster the faults are moving, the more likely it is that they will appear overdue,' said study author Vasiliki Mouslopoulou, a senior scientist at the National Observatory of Athens, in Greece. In tectonically active California, the San Andreas Fault has a particularly high slip rate. The Pacific and North American plates slide past each other an average of more than inch per year in some spots. 'Faults in California are among the fastest-slipping faults in the world,' Mouslopoulou said, adding that other factors are also probably contributing due to the pattern of chronically late large earthquakes. Previous studies had also shown that seismic activity has been unusually subdued in California, compared with paleorecords. A 2019 study reported that there's been a 100-year hiatus in ground-rupturing earthquakes at a number of paleoseismic sites in California, including on the San Andreas and Hayward faults. The authors of the 2019 study treated large earthquakes at these sites as independent events, akin to flipping pennies and counting how many turn up heads. They calculated a 0.3% probability that there'd be a 100-year hiatus in ground-rupturing quakes across all the California sites. Scientists have suggested that there could be earthquake 'supercycles,' with large quakes occurring in clusters, with less active periods in between. 'There are these longer-term, decadal, century-long ups and downs in the rate of earthquakes,' Jones said. Potentially, California is in a quiet time and large earthquakes are currently less likely. Katherine Scharer, a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist who wasn't part of the new research, commended the authors of the study, explaining that compiling the paleoseismic records was a 'tremendous amount of work' and will enable more scientists to investigate earthquakes. California's relatively sparse big earthquake activity could be connected to the geometry of its faults. While the analyzed faults in California were more or less in line with each other, those in other regions resembled 'a plate of spaghetti,' Scharer said. 'From the study, I think you would say that the main California faults are mechanically different somehow than the averages from these other places,' Glenn Biasi, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who wasn't part of the new work. Biasi emphasized that it's impossible to say if California's faults are truly overdue for a big earthquake. 'The faults slip on their own schedule and for their own reasons,' Biasi said. Scientists can't accurately predict large earthquakes in advance but paleoearthquake data could help. The authors of the new study found that, excluding California's recent lack of large earthquakes, faults around the entire planet have generally produced surface-rupturing quakes at intervals expected from paleoearthquake and historic records. Considering such data could improve earthquake forecasts, Mouslopoulou said.
USA Today
2 days ago
- USA Today
The Big One: Is California 'overdue' for a devastating major earthquake?
The Big One: Is California 'overdue' for a devastating major earthquake? A near-certain disaster looms for California, but there are real things people can do to prepare. Here's what to know about the risks. Show Caption Hide Caption California governor signs emergency declaration after quake California's governor says "we're concerned about damage" from magnitude 7 earthquake." It's the unavoidable series of questions Christine Goulet gets every time she's asked what she does for a living. "When is the next big earthquake coming? Do you know where? When should we get ready?" Goulet, director of the U.S. Geological Survey's Earthquake Science Center in Los Angeles, told USA TODAY. "It's almost without fail once they know I study earthquakes. If I received a dollar every time I'm asked, I'd be rich." Goulet has answers, but she can't predict the future. The ominous truth: The Big One could happen any time, and there's more than one possible "Big One." "It's gonna happen. An earthquake could be in a matter of minutes, the next hour, tomorrow, or in a week from now, we can't predict that precisely at this time. We don't know," Goulet said. "But the point in general is we want and need to prepare for them." 'Swaying back and forth': Magnitude 7 earthquake, aftershocks rock California The most authoritative research on the risk to California was conducted in 2015, but little has changed in the past decade. The state will almost certainly face a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake within the next three decades, the USGS concludes. Some of the most at-risk locations are San Francisco and Los Angeles. California's continuous temblor risk coincides with a huge earthquake brewing along the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. San Francisco Bay Area faces high chances of getting a Big One With nearly four dozen faults in the region stretching from Napa to Monterey, the San Francisco Bay Area has a 72% chance of a major quake registering 6.7 magnitude or higher by 2043, USGS researchers previously estimated. The findings also indicate that the Bay Area has a 51% chance of experiencing an earthquake with a magnitude of 7 and a 20% chance of measuring a magnitude of 7.5 or higher within that time frame. "The earthquake threat is very real," said Richard Allen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab. "It is a real challenge as we have to take that long-term view, but also not to live our lives in fear." In December, thousands in the Bay Area and across Northern California were worried after a magnitude 7 earthquake struck along a sparsely populated northern coast of California, triggering a tsunami warning across a swath of the West Coast stretching from southern Oregon to San Francisco. Traci Grant, 53, a public relations specialist who felt the quake in San Francisco, told USA TODAY at the time she felt her retrofitted apartment move in slow motion. "It just kept going and going," Grant said. "It was scary and a bit exciting at the same time. It was more of a roll than just shake, shake, shake." Fragile environment: A collapsing glacier destroyed a Swiss village. Is climate change to blame? Less than two hours after the initial quake, some areas experienced 13 different aftershocks, ranging from 5.1 to 3.1, the USGS reported. Two hours after that, at least 39 aftershocks of at least a 2.5 magnitude occured in the region, authorities said. No earthquake-related injuries or major damages were reported. Goulet said if the quake had been directly on land, "the impact would've been more devastating." Goulet said December's quake magnitude conjured up the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. It was a nearly minute-long 7.9 magnitude quake followed by a fire that burned for three days, destroying thousands of buildings. The San Francisco quake killed an estimated 3,000 people and destroyed roughly 80% of the city. It is known as one of the deadliest in U.S. history. Allen also noted the 1868 Hayward Fault earthquake that struck the heart of the Bay Area and killed 30 people. With all the Bay Area faults, Allen said his research shows there's a "two-in-three chance" the Big One could be soon. "We're overdue for a recurrence," Allen said. The last major earthquake in the Bay Area occurred more than a decade ago, when an earthquake rattled Napa Valley in 2014. The 6.0 magnitude quake in Wine Country killed one person and injured 300 people. The incident caused more than $1 billion in damage across Napa and neighboring cities, including Vallejo, California, which took years to rebuild. Then there was the Loma Prieta earthquake that rocked the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, killing 63 people and injuring nearly 3,800 others. The earthquake disrupted the World Series and damaged the Bay Bridge, Oakland's Cypress Freeway, and swaths of San Francisco. It caused up to $10 billion in damage. "There's this perception that large quakes are frequent, but actually, they are quite rare," Goulet said. "We just don't know when they will happen." Los Angeles is ripe for a Big One as well The Los Angeles area also stands a chance of getting a major earthquake, as there's a 60% chance of a 6.7 magnitude quake within the next 30 years, the USGS said. Additionally, there is also a 46% probability that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake will hit L.A. and a 31% chance a 7.5 magnitude quake will strike during that same period. Allen, the Berkeley seismologist, said Southern California has just as high an earthquake risk compared to its Northern California counterparts. "They face a similar threat, if not higher," Allen said. Goulet added that with Los Angeles and the surrounding areas being so populous (nearly 18.6 million residents according to California Finance Department statistics), there is a high probability for major destruction. She cites the disastrous 6.7 earthquake in Northridge, California, in 1994, which killed 60 people and injured more than 7,000. The devastation also left thousands of buildings and structures collapsed or damaged across Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange and San Bernardino counties. Thousands of residents became homeless as the aftermath caused between $13 billion to $20 billion in damages. "The closer an earthquake is to a large population, the greater the impact will be," Goulet said. Goulet also points to a sequence of earthquakes in 2019 in Ridgecrest, California. A 7.1 magnitude earthquake rattled the city two days after an initial 6.4 magnitude quake. Goulet was among a USGS on-site team researching the first quake when, surprisingly, the second temblor struck. "It was terrifying," Goulet said. "We were there taking measurements and just as we were finishing our work and planning for the next day, the second one occurred about six miles away from us. That was extremely close." Goulet said she remembers reassuring panicked residents that everything would be okay. "That's why we cannot specifically predict earthquakes, when and where they will occur and how big they will be," Goulet added. "But what we can do is collect all of the research that causes earthquakes and the probabilities, which are called probabilistic seismic hazard analysis." Now what?: Federal database that tracked costly weather disasters no longer being updated How to prepare for an earthquake disaster Huge earthquakes have long been an existential crisis for millions along the West Coast, as described in a 2022 USA TODAY article. But experts said there are real things people can do to help them prepare for a major disaster. If you experience an earthquake, Sarah Minson, a research geophysicist with the USGS's Earthquake Science Center in Mountain View, California, advises not to run. "If you feel shaking, you should drop, cover and hold on to protect yourself," Minson said. "Don't go anywhere. Don't run outside. A huge number of the injuries that occur in earthquakes are people stepping on broken glass or trying to run during the shaking and falling down." Allen, the Berkeley seismologist, recommends that households create an earthquake plan, including where they will meet and possibly have a bag or suitcase ready for at least a couple of days. Residents will at least want a flashlight and a way to charge their phone. They should also be prepared to have access to electricity or water cut off for days or weeks. Here are a few practical tips: When trying to use your phone, text – don't call. In a disaster, text messages are more reliable and strain cell networks less. To power your phone, you can cheaply buy a combination weather radio, flashlight and hand-crank charger to keep your cell running even without power for days. A cash reserve is good to have, USGS seismologist Lucy Jones previously said. You'll want to be able to buy things, even if your credit card doesn't work for a time. Simple things like securing bookshelves can save lives. Downloading an early warning app can give you precious moments to protect yourself in the event of a big quake. Buying earthquake insurance can protect homeowners. And taking part in a yearly drill can help remind you about other easy steps you can take to prepare. Contributing: Elizabeth Wiese and Joel Shannon
