A gentle-looking plume of white steam is actually diluted battery acid. And it is building new land.
Image: Bing Daily Wallpaper · Massive lava flows pouring into the ocean, Big Island, Hawaii, USA (© Ken McCurdy/Getty Images) · Official original image.
Open the Bing homepage, and a river of orange-red is charging down a black slope and crashing into the deep blue Pacific. Where they meet, white columns billow upward, as if someone had set a thousand kettles boiling at the water's edge all at once.
Bing titled this photo "The Power of Kīlauea Volcano." The caption is more specific: massive lava flows pouring into the ocean, on the Big Island of Hawaii. And the link on the homepage points to "Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park"—the reason today's image is this one is hidden right there. First the image, then the date.
What happens when magma meets seawater
You probably imagine lava entering the ocean as a quick hiss and a bit of white steam.
In reality, that white mass is far less gentle than it looks.
Lava temperatures can exceed 1,000 °C. It flash-boils the seawater on contact, and the leftover salt reacts with steam at high temperatures to produce hydrochloric acid. At the same time, the scorching lava, shocked by cold water, shatters instantly into extremely fine, needle-like particles—volcanic glass. So that rising column is a mixture of three things: steam, hydrochloric acid, and glass dust.
The U.S. Geological Survey coined a special term for it: laze, a blend of lava and haze. Its acidity falls between pH 1.5 and 3.5; scientists describe its corrosiveness as roughly equivalent to diluted battery acid. As for the glass dust, one geologist came up with a brilliantly vivid analogy: getting it on your skin feels like someone threw a handful of glitter at you—except this glitter cuts your eyes, skin, and lungs.
During the 2018 Kīlauea eruption, wind-carried laze drifted more than twenty kilometers beyond the ocean entry point. In 2000, laze from a lava ocean entry killed two people.
So those photographers standing far back, shooting only with telephoto lenses—they're the smart ones.
But this dangerous white plume is building new land
Shift your gaze downward from the steam. The lava doesn't stop at the shoreline; it keeps pushing into the water.
This submerged lava has a rather elegant name: pillow lava. The outer shell solidifies the instant seawater touches it, while the molten interior keeps squeezing forward, bulging out one rounded pillow shape after another. Pillows, rubble, glass sand—they stack up layer upon layer, forming a steep underwater slope. When that slope builds past the original coastline, it becomes a new piece of land. Geologists call it a "lava delta."
This new land is extremely young and extremely unreliable. Beneath it lies loose debris that could collapse wholesale into the sea at any moment, triggering scalding waves and explosions when it does. The USGS puts it bluntly: no one can predict when a lava delta will collapse or how large the collapse will be.
But this is exactly how the Hawaiian Islands grew. The Pacific Plate drifts slowly over a fixed mantle hotspot, and the hotspot burns through the plate one hole after another. The material erupted from each hole piles up above sea level and becomes an island. The Big Island is the youngest link in that chain. It's still growing.
Why today
Because today is August 1.
On this day in 1916, Woodrow Wilson signed the act establishing a national park in what was then only a U.S. territory—Hawaii. It was the first national park created on American territory rather than in a state.
There's also an easily overlooked time gap: the National Park Service, the agency responsible for managing all national parks, wouldn't be officially established until more than three weeks later, on August 25. In other words, this park is three weeks older than its own parent agency.
Its original name was "Hawaii National Park," and it spanned two islands: Kīlauea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island, plus Haleakalā on Maui. In 1961, the two halves split. Haleakalā became its own park, and the Big Island half was renamed what it's called today: Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park.
This year marks its 110th anniversary.
And the park is in the middle of a very eventful stretch right now
Starting December 23, 2024, the Halemaʻumaʻu crater at Kīlauea's summit settled into a peculiar rhythm—not a continuous flow, but eruptions in pulses. Pressure builds until it bursts for a few hours, then stops, then slowly builds again. The observatory can even use tilt readings from the ground to circle the next eruption window days in advance.
By July of this year, the rhythm had reached its 52nd episode.
The episode on the night of July 28 produced lava fountains reaching approximately 150 meters, an ash plume rising to about 5,800 meters above sea level, and lasted over seven hours, with the erupted lava covering nearly half the crater floor. For comparison: the previous record holder was the Puʻu ʻŌʻō vent on Kīlauea's East Rift Zone—between 1983 and 1986, it erupted 47 times in the same pulsing fashion, taking three and a half years. This current cycle matched that number in roughly a year and a half.
A note, though: the lava currently in the park is entirely contained within the crater. It is not flowing to the coast as in the photo. To see lava entering the ocean in person, you'd have to wait for the next time lava finds a path down to the shore. That could be years from now, or decades.
Closing
We tend to think of maps as finished documents.
But every time lava walks to the sea again, the map needs a small revision: the coastline shifts outward by a few dozen meters, and a tiny patch of black, still-hot, still-unnamed land appears.
For a park turning 110, there's probably no more fitting way to celebrate.
Sources: U.S. National Park Service (Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park founding act and park history), USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (lava ocean entry and laze hazards, Kīlauea Episode 52 eruption bulletin), Bing homepage caption.