🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE Scientists are collecting solidified lava that resembles both hair and tears to learn about the activity bubbling beneath Kīlauea in Hawaii.
and creating open fissures and spewing magma fountains that drape and drip down the mountain’s rocky sides. Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire, is said to live atop its lava lake summit, now one of the world’s most active, and, will unfurl a curse on those who dare remove rock or lava from her sooty domain.
Volcanologists dare toy with guidebook fate — the prizes are precious and telling. They search for Pele’s hair and Pele’s tears. Hours after an eruption begins within Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, geochemist Kendra J. Lynn treads carefully along Kīlauea terrain, observing the airborne formations in the volcanic mouth above.
When molten lava spews from a volcano and meets the cooler air, it quickly begins to solidify, a process called quenching. Pele’s hair is the byproduct of lava bubbles that are simultaneously quenching and popping. “The bubbles, when they burst, stretch and stretch into a really thin film,” says Lynn.
The lava hardens and stretches, “sort of like when you pull a caramel candy apart, or like a piece of bubblegum,” she says. When at last it becomes completely solid and completely stretched, what used to be a hot and popping lava bubble now resembles long, glassy strands of hair: wafting through the air, accumulating downwind, near where Lynn surveys. She must handle Pele’s hair with care. The thin filaments break easily, often slivering underneath skin.
Pele’s hair is “easiest to see in the sunlight, as it looks like gleaming gold spider webs on the ground,” says geologist Cheryl Gansecki. But Pele’s tears are never an easy find, laying hidden and buried within the goddess’s tousles of hair. The tears are shaped like little commas, or tadpoles, or raindrops; obsidian black with a glassy sheen, denser than the hair and often. They too are volcanic glass, the result of lava quenching without stretching.
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