Lava flows in Pahoa - Eruption Updates

  • 3 years ago
This video was made to show at the Pahoa Transfer Station for schoolchildren visiting to see the new lava flows. It gives a brief history of what happened up though November 2014.

What Are Lava Zones?
There are 9 lava zones for the five volcanoes (Kīlauea, Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, Hualālai, and Kohala) on the Big Island. Per the US Geological Survey, USGS, “the zones, ranked from 1 through 9, represent a scale of decreasing hazard as the numbers increase, based on the probability of coverage by lava flows.

Pahoa is a census-designated place (CDP) in the District of Puna in Hawai‘i County, Hawai‘i, United States. The population was 962 at the 2000 census. The population dropped by 1.8% to 945 at the 2010 census.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 2.3 square miles (6.0 km2), all of it land. Soils underlying the Pahoa area are volcanic in origin, deriving from the currently active Kīlauea Volcano in Hawaii. (Earth Metrics Inc., 1986) Kīlauea is one of the Earth's most active volcanoes, with the January 2006 eruption being the longest rift zone eruption in Kīlauea's 200-year recorded history. (Volcanology, 2007) The volcanic soils underlying Pahoa are considered to have been generated by lava flows within the last 125 to 500 years. For example, the eruption of 1840 is known to have deposited a lava flow within 1.5 miles (2.4 km) of Pahoa. Both Hawaii Route 130 and Hawaii Route 132 enter the town boundaries.

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