Kīlauea Eruption Update, Day 8: December 28, 2020

One week and a day into Kīlauea’s 2020 summit eruption and there is the possibly of surface activity pausing or becoming intermittent in the days ahead, or continuing at a lower rate, based on imagery & data we present from releases from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. We review the last two days in the context of the 2020 eruption thus far, including frame-by-frame analysis and annotation of thermal timelapses of the changing lava lake, monitoring and seismic signals from USGS instruments, and gas trends and impacts on the downwind communities living on the volcano. Gas emissions have dropped by a factor of 8 since the height of the eruption earlier this week, but vog persists on the Kona side of Hawaiʻi Island. We recap the changes in the eruptive vents, overflow margins, and the rafting island inside the ~5.6 billion gallon lava-lake. #2020kilaueaeruption​ https://youtu.be/5iE24jWhNaA