A rare picture of red-hot lava dome fountain from 1969 is going viral after being posted on the social media. The mindboggling picture has left the internet users curious to know more about it.
The United States Geological Survey shared the picture last week, highlighting the lava-dome fountain that was spotted in Hawaii on October 11, 1969. This dome was developed during the eruption of Mauna Ulu -- a volcanic cone in the active Kīlauea volcano.
The outpour of lava from the volcanic eruption lasted for a total of 1,774 days – becoming the longest-lasting and the most voluminous eruption on Kīlauea in at least 2200 years.
However, the record has been broken by Pu'u 'Ō'ō, a volcanic cone on Kīlauea's east rift that has been pouring out lava for the past 35 years, and started in 1983.
Dome fountain of episode 10, October 10–13, 1969, eruption of Kilauea Volcano. This dome fountain is about 20 m (65 ft) high. Symmetrical dome fountains such as this are rare. #Tbt #HI @Volcanoes_NPS pic.twitter.com/sKSQaVINKs
— USGS (@USGS) March 29, 2018
The Mauna Ulu eruption was so huge that the cooling lava created a new landscape altogether on the side of Kīlauea. Though it's generally known that lava just explodes all over the place, perfectly rounded dome fountain also takes place like in this case.
Unlike the lava that flows, "The lava that forms domes is often too thick and sticky to flow very far, and thus instead pile up thick and high around the vent," Oregon State explained in a blog post
The foreground in the picture is not the ocean, as it might seem at first; it's just a landscape of cooled lava, Science Alert noted. Even one of the users asked the same commenting: "At first I thought this dome was coming up out of the sea, but it is coming up out of a lava field, correct?"
According to United States Geological Survey's tweet, the height of the dome is roughly 65 feet (20 meters), their records suggest that at some point the fountain may have reached as high as 246 feet (75 meters).
