It’s easy to forget that the earth below us is always changing and shifting – and hot, but sometimes, we get a dramatic demonstration of exactly that, when a volcano erupts and for the time of its eruption, devastates everything in its path.

Ring of Fire

On the southeastern border of the island of Hawaii, a mountain emerged above sea level about a hundred thousand years ago to its present elevation of 1247m. That mountain is Kilauea, Hawaii’s youngest and busiest volcano. Since 1983, Kilauea has been erupting on-and-off; the last eruption happened last month, though it was all over after just eight hours.

Kilauea is not an imposing or high mountain as volcanoes go, nor is it an explosive one. It’s eruptions are not caused by the grating movements of giant tectonic plates under the earth’s surface that give some volcanoes their explosive character. Rather Kilauea happens to be part of a hotspot chain, areas deep within the Earth’s mantle where heat rises up melting rock in the upper portion of the mantle. And Hawaii is in the middle of a vast hot spot chain that extends from the island itself to the edge of the Aleutian Trench near the eastern coast of Russia.

SueEllen Campbell, a professor of English at Colorado State University who teaches courses in nature and environmental literature was given a ringside view of a Kilauea eruption chronicled in her lively book of essays, The Face of the Earth (2011). Here are excerpts from the book.

“We park the cars where lava obliterates the road, then set out across the wavy, corrugated terrain of Kilauea’s lower edge. The view is sweeping, simple, and subtle: to our right the clean line of the Pacific, to our left the deceptively gentle slopes of Kilauea and Mauna Loa, the most massive mountain on earth.

We inch forward. The air grows warmer, then hot. Something sharp and acrid hits the back of my throat and make my breath shallow. My eyes begin to water. Wind rushes across my ears. My heart pounds. I stop moving and look – ahead a few feet, and then down.

How can I describe this?

I see a river of fire, but fire without flames, without those pale yellows, blues, and greens of a campfire, just a stunning intensity of reddish orange that says nothing so urgently as hot. I feel it scorching my skin. Thicker than water or syrup, it’s the color of an electric stove burner on high. It pulses as it flows, the pulsing of hot coals, of blood in arteries. It’s very fast and mostly silent – a quiet hiss, an occasional soft gargle. It’s maybe ten feet across, no telling how deep. Patches of darkness appear and disappear on the surface, orange cooling to black, folding under, returning to liquid. It looks like the films I’ve seen of liquid steel flowing out of huge vats into the forms of I beams, the outpouring of some enormous underground foundry.

This is not the familiar stuff of Earth’s surface, this beautiful, terrifying river of life. It is the material of the mantle, channeled upward through magma chambers and plumes, melting as the pressure on it lessens closer to the surface. But something closer to instinct tells me what it is, too, something beneath or maybe before words, some recognition hard-wired into my species by our long association with volcanic landscapes. I know that just here and just now, I’m seeing the inside of the planet, the world turned inside out.”

Terrible Beauty: Photogs of Kilauea Eruptions between 2014 and 2023

Volcanoes can devastate and destroy, but they are also an integral part of our planet’s history and evolution. The May 2018 eruption by Kilauea is a case in point. The eruption produced the equivalent of 320,000 Olympic-size swimming pools of lava. Much of it ended up flowing into the Pacific Ocean, where it helped spark an explosion in phytoplankton, microscopic organisms that play an important role in the planet’s health. This seemingly unlikely event happened because as the larva enters the sea, they heat the deeper, nutrient-rich waters which then rose to the surface where the phytoplankton had a feast.