A 65-foot-high fiery lava bubble in Hawaii from 1969 that was posted on the internet as a throwback went viral last week as people wanted to know more about the rare phenomenon.
The United States Geological Survey shared the picture of the Kilauea eruption on March 29 on Twitter, noting that “Symmetrical dome fountains such as this are rare.”
The tweet was retweeted more than 400 times and liked more than 900 times.
The magma involved when a dome forms is more gooey than usual, and the pressure of the vent is not strong enough to blow the magma all the way out in explosive fashion, Oregon State research stated. The dome can be up to 1,640 feet high; the one pictured was about 65 feet high.
The dome pictured lasted for 1,774 days, or about five years, and produced 350 million cubic meters of lava, or enough to fill 140,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, LiveScience reported.
A viewing platform made the rare phenomenon of the dome easy for the public to see.
Twitter users were impressed, anyway.
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