Two thousand degrees and flowing while glowing, “eruption 61g” lava further coated the Big Island’s Kalapana plain, radiating more than enough heat to keep observers warm on a cool winter morning a few hundred feet above, and a couple miles upslope from, the tropical Pacific. With dawn’s brightening light, the various flowing and cooled breakouts made a truly “lava-ly landscape“. Over a few thousand years, as Kilauea eruptions shift their flows to lower ground elsewhere, the hot harshness and sharp rocks will cool, weather and smooth, and colonizing plants will occupy new soil, ultimately yielding to grasses, then bushes, then trees. Growing biomes on deepening soil will resemble the more heavily vegetated, jungle-like areas still further uphill.
4 W Kalapana HI (22 Dec 17) Looking S
19.3488, -155.048