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Powers Caldera
The Powers Caldera is a buried summit caldera of Kīlauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. It is the precursor to the modern but smaller Kīlauea Caldera, having formed about 2,200 years ago as a result of powerful phreatomagmatic eruptions. These explosive eruptions lasted for a period of about 1,200 years, during which time the Uwēkahuna Ash Member was deposited. Sometime between 850 and 950 CE, the most powerful explosive eruption sent rocks weighing at least from the summit. Golf ball-sized rocks fell at the coast, away. Effusive eruptions began to fill the Powers Caldera with lava about 1,000 years ago, breaking the 1,200-year-long interval dominated by explosive eruptions. Lava completely filled the Powers Caldera and then overtopped its rim, solidifying the structure. This was followed by a period of voluminous tube-fed lava flows from 1000 to 1500 CE (including the ʻAilāʻau eruption), with the modern smaller Kīlauea Caldera having formed inside the buried Powers Cal ...
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Effusive Eruption
An effusive eruption is a type of volcanic eruption in which lava steadily flows out of a volcano onto the ground. Overview There are two major groupings of eruptions: effusive and explosive. Effusive eruption differs from explosive eruption, wherein magma is violently fragmented and rapidly expelled from a volcano. Effusive eruptions are most common in basaltic magmas, but they also occur in intermediate and felsic magmas. These eruptions form lava flows and lava domes, each of which vary in shape, length, and width. Deep in the crust, gasses are dissolved into the magma because of high pressures, but upon ascent and eruption, pressure drops rapidly, and these gasses begin to exsolve out of the melt. A volcanic eruption is effusive when the erupting magma is volatile poor (water, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen fluoride), which suppresses fragmentation, creating an oozing magma which spills out of the volcanic vent and out into the surroundi ...
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United States Government Publishing Office
The United States Government Publishing Office (USGPO or GPO; formerly the United States Government Printing Office) is an agency of the legislative branch of the United States Federal government. The office produces and distributes information products and services for all three branches of the Federal Government, including U.S. passports for the Department of State as well as the official publications of the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Executive Office of the President, executive departments, and independent agencies. An act of Congress changed the office's name to its current form in 2014. History The Government Printing Office was created by congressional joint resolution () on June 23, 1860. It began operations March 4, 1861, with 350 employees and reached a peak employment of 8,500 in 1972. The agency began transformation to computer technology in the 1980s; along with the gradual replacement of paper with electronic document distribution, this has led to a stea ...
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Fault (geology)
In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic forces, with the largest forming the boundaries between the plates, such as the megathrust faults of subduction zones or transform faults. Energy release associated with rapid movement on active faults is the cause of most earthquakes. Faults may also displace slowly, by aseismic creep. A ''fault plane'' is the plane that represents the fracture surface of a fault. A ''fault trace'' or ''fault line'' is a place where the fault can be seen or mapped on the surface. A fault trace is also the line commonly plotted on geologic maps to represent a fault. A ''fault zone'' is a cluster of parallel faults. However, the term is also used for the zone of crushed rock along a single fault. Prolonged motion along closely spaced faults can blur the ...
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Fault Scarp
A fault scarp is a small step or offset on the ground surface where one side of a fault has moved vertically with respect to the other. It is the topographic expression of faulting attributed to the displacement of the land surface by movement along faults. They are exhibited either by differential movement and subsequent erosion along an old ''inactive'' geologic fault (a sort of old rupture), or by a movement on a recent active fault. Characteristics Fault scarps often contain highly fractured rock of both hard and weak consistency. In many cases, bluffs form from the upthrown block and can be very steep. The height of the scarp formation is equal to the vertical displacement along the fault. Active scarps are usually formed by tectonic displacement, e.g. when an earthquake changes the elevation of the ground and can be caused by any type of fault, including strike-slip faults, whose motion is primarily horizontal. This movement is usually episodic, with the height of the bluf ...
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ʻAilāʻau Eruption
The ʻAilāʻau eruption is a prehistoric eruption of Kīlauea volcano on the island of Hawaiʻi in the Hawaiian Islands. Carbon 14 dated from approximately 1410 to 1470 with an eruptive volume of 5.2 ± 0.8 km3 and fed by lava tubes near Kīlauea Iki crater, it was among the last of a series of highly voluminous lava flows since about 1290 that blanketed vast swaths of what is now Hawaii County's Puna District. The Kazumura Cave lava tubes were also created by this eruption. The ʻAilāʻau eruption occurred before written records, but was witnessed by Ancient Hawaiians, and through their oral traditions it is thought to have inspired the Hawaiian myth of ʻAilāʻau, whose name in the Hawaiian language Hawaiian (', ) is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language o ... means "forest-eater" in ...
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Lava Tube
A lava tube, or pyroduct, is a natural conduit formed by flowing lava from a volcanic vent that moves beneath the hardened surface of a lava flow. If lava in the tube empties, it will leave a cave. Formation A lava tube is a type of lava cave formed when a low-viscosity lava flow develops a continuous and hard crust, which thickens and forms a roof above the still-flowing lava stream. Tubes form in one of two ways: either by the crusting over of lava channels, or from pāhoehoe flows where the lava is moving under the surface. Lava usually leaves the point of eruption in channels. These channels tend to stay very hot as their surroundings cool. This means they slowly develop walls around them as the surrounding lava cools and/or as the channel melts its way deeper. These channels can get deep enough to crust over, forming an insulating tube that keeps the lava molten and serves as a conduit for the flowing lava. These types of lava tubes tend to be closer to the lava erupt ...
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Lava
Lava is molten or partially molten rock (magma) that has been expelled from the interior of a terrestrial planet (such as Earth) or a moon onto its surface. Lava may be erupted at a volcano or through a fracture in the crust, on land or underwater, usually at temperatures from . The volcanic rock resulting from subsequent cooling is also often called ''lava''. A lava flow is an outpouring of lava during an effusive eruption. (An explosive eruption, by contrast, produces a mixture of volcanic ash and other fragments called tephra, not lava flows.) The viscosity of most lava is about that of ketchup, roughly 10,000 to 100,000 times that of water. Even so, lava can flow great distances before cooling causes it to solidify, because lava exposed to air quickly develops a solid crust that insulates the remaining liquid lava, helping to keep it hot and inviscid enough to continue flowing. The word ''lava'' comes from Italian and is probably derived from the Latin word ''labes ...
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Explosive Eruption
In volcanology, an explosive eruption is a volcanic eruption of the most violent type. A notable example is the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Such eruptions result when sufficient gas has dissolved under pressure within a viscous magma such that expelled lava violently froths into volcanic ash when pressure is suddenly lowered at the vent. Sometimes a lava plug will block the conduit to the summit, and when this occurs, eruptions are more violent. Explosive eruptions can expel as much as per second of rocks, dust, gas and pyroclastic material, averaged over the duration of eruption, that travels at several hundred meters per second as high as into the atmosphere. This cloud may subsequently collapse, creating a fast-moving pyroclastic flow of hot volcanic matter. Stages of an explosive eruption An explosive eruption begins with some form of blockage in the crater of a volcano that prevents the release of gases trapped in highly viscous andesitic or rhyolitic magma. The pr ...
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Caldera
A caldera ( ) is a large cauldron-like hollow that forms shortly after the emptying of a magma chamber in a volcano eruption. When large volumes of magma are erupted over a short time, structural support for the rock above the magma chamber is gone. The ground surface then collapses into the emptied or partially emptied magma chamber, leaving a large depression at the surface (from one to dozens of kilometers in diameter). Although sometimes described as a Volcanic crater, crater, the feature is actually a type of sinkhole, as it is formed through subsidence and collapse rather than an explosion or impact. Compared to the thousands of volcanic eruptions that occur each century, the formation of a caldera is a rare event, occurring only a few times per century. Only seven caldera-forming collapses are known to have occurred between 1911 and 2016. More recently, a caldera collapse occurred at Kīlauea, Hawaii in 2018. Etymology The term ''caldera'' comes from Spanish language, S ...
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Phreatomagmatic Eruption
Phreatomagmatic eruptions are volcanic eruptions resulting from interaction between magma and water. They differ from exclusively magmatic eruptions and phreatic eruptions. Unlike phreatic eruptions, the products of phreatomagmatic eruptions contain juvenile (magmatic) clasts.Heiken, G. & Wohletz, K. 1985. Volcanic Ash. University of California Press, Berkeley It is common for a large explosive eruption to have magmatic and phreatomagmatic components. Mechanisms Several competing theories exist as to the exact mechanism of ash formation. The most common is the theory of explosive thermal contraction of particles under rapid cooling from contact with water. In many cases the water is supplied by the sea, for example with Surtsey. In other cases the water may be present in a lake or caldera-lake, for example Santorini, where the phreatomagmatic component of the Minoan eruption was a result of both a lake and later the sea. There have also been examples of interaction between magma a ...
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Kīlauea Caldera
The Kīlauea Caldera (Hawaiian: Kaluapele), officially gazetted as Kīlauea Crater, is a caldera located at the summit of Kīlauea, an active shield volcano in the Hawaiian Islands. It has an extreme length of , an extreme width of , a circumference of and an area of . It contains Halemaʻumaʻu, an active pit crater near the caldera's southwestern edge. The walls of the caldera consist of fault scarps that have formed as a result of down-sinking of the caldera floor. Much of the caldera floor is covered by lava flows erupted since the 19th century. The Kīlauea Caldera and neighboring Kīlauea Iki are circled by Crater Rim Drive, an long paved road that provides access to Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory was established on the rim of the Kīlauea Caldera in 1912. Outside of Halemaʻumaʻu, eruptions from the Kīlauea Caldera have taken place in 1982, 1975, 1974, 1971, 1921, 1919, 1918, and possibly in 1820 and 1790. See also * List of volcan ...
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