Walking through lava fields in Hawaii

This video was shot in Hawaii, and takes place in terrain that was once covered in molten lava flows. The cooled lava leaves behind a rugged terrain of hardened brittle rock. Black, grey and folded in the weird rippled patterns, although cooled, you can see the way in which the lava once flowed and tumbled over itself not long ago.

People often use the terms magma and lava interchangeably when talking about the molten rock that flows from volcanoes. In fact, magma is the term for the molten rock when it is underground, what flows beneath the earth’s crust. The moment this magma erupts from a volcano and is exposed to the air it becomes lava.

Hawaii is an extremely active volcanic zone, made up of a series of islands that were created by underwater volcanoes, many of which are still active today.

At the end of the video we see plumes of smoke rising from the ocean in the distance. This is in fact an active lava flow that is pouring in the Pacific Ocean, super-heating the water around it and cooling quickly, vaporizing the sea water into a plume of vapor. There are still many active lava flows in Hawaii, and the one the people are standing on can’t be that old.

At the beginning of the video as the person filming picks up a piece of the cooled lava, we see that it is brittle and porous, flaking off the rocks and cracking easily.

With such a newly formed and unknown terrain, there is an air of mystery. Cooled lava flows are not a sight that people see every day, and the mystery of the terrain is highlighted in the music, which makes the video both intriguing and quizzical.

Eventually, if lava does not flow here again, plants and animals will slowly start to colonize this rocky terrain. In ecology this is called primary succession, when biological organisms are able to colonize an untouched area for the first time, like a newly cooled lava flow, or the area uncovered from a retreating glacier.