Kilauea Volcano Big Island, Hawaii

Kīlauea ( is an active shield volcano in the Hawaiian Islands. Located along the southeastern shore of Hawai’i Island, the volcano is between 210,000 and 280,000 years old and emerged above sea level about 100,000 years ago.

Historically, it is the most active of the five volcanoes that together form the island of Hawaii. Kīlauea is also one of the most active volcanoes on Earth, with the most recent eruption occurring for a week in September 2023 when multiple vents erupted lava within the volcano’s summit caldera inside Halemaʻumaʻu crater.

Like all Hawaiian volcanoes, Kīlauea was formed as the Pacific tectonic plate moved over the Hawaiian hotspot in the Earth’s underlying mantle.The Hawaii island volcanoes are the most recent evidence of this process that, over 70 million years, has produced the 6,000 km (3,700 mi)-long Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain.

The prevailing, though not completely settled, view is that the hotspot has been largely stationary within the planet’s mantle for much, if not all of the Cenozoic Era.However, while the Hawaiian mantle plume is well understood and extensively studied, the nature of hotspots themselves remains fairly enigmatic.