When Kilauea Erupted, a New Volcanic Playbook Was Written
The New York Times
Scientists learned lessons from the 2018 outburst on the island of Hawaii that are changing how responders prepare for eruptions in other places.
Back in the summer of 2018, Wendy Stovall stood and stared into the heart of an inferno.
Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano had been continuously erupting in one form or another since 1983. But from May to August, the volcano produced its magnum opus, unleashing 320,000 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of molten rock from its eastern flank.
Dr. Stovall, the deputy scientist-in-charge at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, recalls moments of being awe-struck by the eruption’s incandescence: lava fountains roaring like jet engines, painting the inky blue sky in crimson hues. But these briefly exhilarating moments were overwhelmed by sadness. The people of Hawaii would suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in economic damage. The lava bulldozed around 700 homes. Thousands of lives were upended. Even the headquarters of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory itself, sitting atop the volcano, was torn apart by earthquakes early in the crisis.
As the glaciers of South America retreat, the supply of freshwater is dwindling and its quality is getting worse.
It’s something turkey often isn’t — undeniably juicy and a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
A rise in the disease in younger people was not followed by an increase in deaths, a study found, and might be a sign of overdiagnosis.
The Homotherium cub was preserved in Siberian permafrost with its dark fur and flesh intact.
A small study found ChatGPT outdid human physicians when assessing medical case histories, even when those doctors were using a chatbot.
For a century, exoplanet hunters have “discovered” planets around a nearby star, only to retract the claims. But the latest find is for real.
The unidentified patient had recently returned from Africa, where the virus has caused a deadly epidemic, health officials said.
The event produces some of the year’s fastest meteors, although the nearly full moon may make them challenging to spot.
Mr. Musk dug into his companies’ budgets, preferring to cut too much rather than too little and to deal with the fallout later. Under Donald Trump, he is set to apply those tactics to the U.S. government.
Behind the scenes at a Chicago zoo, chimpanzees who spent years entertaining humans are learning to befriend their own kind.
The agency’s top medical official was responding to rumors that Suni Williams had lost an unusual amount of weight during an extended stay in orbit.