One order of fresh lava please

I am giving the thumbs up before attempting to collect a fresh pahoehoe lava sample.

The secret to collecting lava samples is akin to the secret behind dropping diced potatoes into boiling water: get it done as quickly as possible and try not to burn yourself.

Warning! Do not try lava sampling without the proper gear. In the picture above, I am wearing a long fire-resistant shirt and pair of pants, leather gloves, a hat and a balaclava (or face mask).

Using the tail of a hammer, I dug into oozing juvenile lava and scooped a bit up. Fresh lava is very gooey like cake batter and the hammer's edge slides on in. If the lava is older, the top surface has solidified and breaking it requires a strong hit. Next, I immediately dropped the lava into a bucket of cool water (see picture below), causing the water to boil and hiss for a few minutes. This process quenches the sample or captures and freezes the current chemical composition of the lava to prevent contamination. It takes the samples upwards of 5 minutes to cool down to a lower enough temperature that I can hold them with my bare hands. When the samples had cooled, my team moved them into a dry bag that was labeled with the date and location.

Samples of hot lava are flung into a bucket of cold water to quench or preserve their chemical composition at the time.

Another way of sampling lava is by flinging a cable with a sharp edge down into a lava tube. This can only be done if there is a skylight or hole into a lava tube. Lava tubes are long conduits of lava along the Earth's surface where the entire outer layer has solidified over. But within the lava tube, there is a stream of moving, hot fire-y lava. One should not, however, create a hole just for this purpose. This collection method is far more dangerous than the rock hammer way, but yields much purer samples (i.e. the samples better preserve the initial magma source composition.)

Besides being cool and a testament to one’s courage and strength, collecting lava samples is essential for geologists to understand an eruption and its magma source. The chemical composition of lava is similar to its maternal magma, and the minerals and dissolved gases that make up the lava can relay whether the magma originated from a deep or shallow source. Moreover, the chemical composition reveals other properties about the eruption such as eruption temperature.

For more information of Kilauea’s magma source (which is nearly 100 kilometers deep into the mantle) and its chemical composition (magnesium and iron rich), as well as how geologists specifically used lava samples to determine Kilauea’s various magma/source properties, check out this Volcano Watch article at http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/1997/97_03_14.html .

An HVO volunteer (not me) collects a sample of red chili-pepper hot lava.