Kilauea Research Paper

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION-History of Kilauea Kilauea has been constantly erupting since 1983 and has not stopped! It is around 4,000 feet tall or 1,219 meters above sea level. It is part of the main land of Hawaii and takes up about fourteen percent of the land. By 1995 five-hundred acres were covered with cooled lava which is within twelve years or eruption. When Kilauea was formed it was formed by a hotspot which is when hot magma breaks through the center plate. II. Kilauea’s Crater Kilauea has a caldera which is a bowl-shaped crater. A caldera is formed by the collapse of the volcano in itself. It is mainly triggered by the emptying of the magma chamber beneath the volcano. There is another type

The deeper source of Kilauea’s eruptions, as with all of Hawaii’s volcanoes is this mantle plume. It’s a blob of hot rock that has risen from the deep inside the Earth and is now torching the Earth’s crust. The mantle plume goes down to near 1,500 kilometers deep and is the biggest one yet that scientists have ever seen. The way the scientists found out how big this plume was by using an array of seismometers on the ocean floor. IV. Above Kilauea From above Kilauea looks very tiny compared to the nearby volcano Mauna Loa. Research over the past decades shows that Kilauea is not a satellite of Mauna Loa as it was once thought. Instead, it has been proven that Kilauea is the youngest volcano on Hawaii’s big island. Kilauea has a sixty kilometer deep magma system in the Earth. Kohala and Mauna Loa are the other volcanoes that make up the curved line in which Kilauea rests. The exact height of Kilauea is 4,190 feet tall or 1,247 meters high. Kilauea takes up 552 square meters of land on the big island. The exact measure of the caldera that I talked about before is three kilometers by five kilometers wide at it’s main depression area. However, at its fault lines it measures six kilometers by six kilometers at the outermost faults. The depth of the caldera is 15,165 meters deep which is an outstanding