Hawaii Volcanoes

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park was established in 1916 on the island of Hawaii and protects some 1,348 km² that include two of the most active volcanoes in the world: Kīlauea and Mauna Loa, the latter the largest volcano by volume on the planet. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1987 as a natural property.

It is a place where geology happens in plain sight. Kīlauea has been in almost continuous eruption for long periods, and the park allows active flows, recent lava fields, lava tubes, fumaroles and the Halemaʻumaʻu crater to be observed. In 2018 a major eruption caused the partial collapse of that crater and forced much of the park to close, permanently altering its topography and its infrastructure.

That dynamism allows ecological succession to be studied from scratch: on bare lava, lichens and ferns settle first, then the ʻōhiʻa lehua, and finally Hawaiian wet forest. The fauna is that of an isolated oceanic archipelago, with extremely high endemism and enormous vulnerability: the nēnē or Hawaiian goose, recovered from some thirty birds in the 1950s, the Hawaiian petrel that breeds on the upper slopes, and the archipelago's only native land mammal, the Hawaiian hoary bat. Kīlauea is also the dwelling place of Pele, the Hawaiian volcano deity, and the park preserves petroglyphs and ceremonial sites of great importance.