A closer look at this jumble of emerging basalts reveals detail and interest among the varied molten, and recently molten, forms in the streams of cooling lava near the Pu'u 'O'o eruption site in Kilauea National Park, Hawaii.
Like many in recent months, I've been seeing the pictures and stories about the ongoing effusive eruption in Iceland, and I have to say I developed a bit of lava envy, which prompted me to go back to my old pics from a fortunate and amazing visit to Kilauea a few years ago. The small area of flow here was one of my favorites because it brought together so many intriguing formations (this image captures an area little more than a few meters/yards wide), along with memories of the heat radiating from the lava and the thrill of the whole experience.
Time and again, as in the left center of this image, we saw these amazing, jagged sawtooth or claw patterns at the boundary between the still glowing lava and the slightly cooler lava beginning to harden to a silver-gray surface that was almost a bit metallic in its initial appearance. Coarse rope-like forms then looped upstream from the sawtooth, and a bright globule of lava bubbled up from among the braids. And further below (toward the lower right in the frame) is a familiar "nautilus" form where the rope-like braids curl about ahead of an elegant reaching finger of still-incandescent lava.
Still other areas nearby appeared to have much finer structure, like thinner yarn moreso than rope, and visible here and there beneath it all is the darker, more-weathered and broken slag of earlier flows. Needless to say, I've yet to learn what slight variances in mineral composition, temperature or topography, among innumerable other possible factors, gave rise to these different forms in such a small area of the same flow. Yet more examples of the ceaseless wonders of our natural world.
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