Kilauea Volcano has made a fantastic transformation over the last year, with the Puu Oo crater complex falling apart in June 07, a new fissure zone and lava flow emerging in July 07, and the reawakening of Halemaumau crater in March 08. We are thrilled to have recorded the unique eruptive signature from the first eruption in the Kilauea caldera since 1982, and the first explosion in Halemaumau since 1924! But perhaps even more impressive for me is the massive amounts of infrasound emerging from this new vent. The dominant signal - Pele’s Chant - has a nearly monochromatic period of 2 seconds, well beyond our detection treshold. There is ocassional audible sound near the vent possibly associated with rocks breaking up. There is always an audio signal in an erupting volcano - if you get close enough to a fresh lava flow you can hear the fresh skin crackle - but it takes a lot of power to produce the really deep sounds! So now we have infrasound coming in from three different regions, and with two arrays we continue to record the continuous hum of the ongoing metamorphosis of Kilauea Volcano.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Milton Garces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.