Volcanic Activity at Kilauea

One of Earth’s most active volcanoes, Kilauea, surged to life on March 5 of this year, spewing fresh flows of lava out the opening of a new fissure and starting off a forest fire that has burned for much of this month. NASA’s Advanced Land Imager (ALI) onboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured the following false-color images of the area.

The first image was taken on January 16 of 2010, while the second image had to wait through many cloudy days before a similar image could be taken for comparison.

A false color image depicts mostly infrared wavelengths of light, and sets vegetation as green, older lava flows as brown to black, and “hot” areas as red. In this case, the scorched land and fresh lava in the burn scar appears slightly red and brown, while the still-burning forest fire appears bright red. In the 2010 image, lava stands out within and near Pu’u ‘O’o.

Source: NASA Earth’ Observatory’s Image of the Day

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