Macdoc wrote:
A perfect hole where the trunk was ....looks like it was crafted into place by a stone mason. We were fascinated by them.

Cito di Pense wrote:

Macdoc wrote:
A perfect hole where the trunk was ....looks like it was crafted into place by a stone mason. We were fascinated by them.

Well, you see, lava is fluid and as such, not only conforms to the shape of its container or obstacles in its path, but is also very hot, and incinerates things, including trees, birds, squirrels and humans. The heat capacity of rock-forming minerals (and magmatic solutions of them) is only a few joules per gram, and so a big enough squirrel won't be completely incinerated by a lava flow. In this case, the tree was not completely incinerated, and so there was no hole for the lava to flow into before it had transitioned from the liquid to the solid state by coming into contact with what was for the lava a very cold tree. It rains occasionally in Hawaii, and the residue of the partially-incinerated tree eventually was washed away by the rain, leaving the hole that we see today. I just thought you might like to know. In Pompeii, Campania, Italia, there are castings of human beings formed by an incandescent ash flow from the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius.

Lava from a Kilauea volcano fissure flows at dawn on Hawaii's Big Island on May 19, 2018 in Kapoho, Hawaii. The U.S. Geological Survey said the volcano erupted explosively on May 17 launching a plume about 30,000 feet into the sky. (MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES)

On Friday afternoon, the lava changed dramatically with one fissure ramping up and sending a flow across a road, destroying four more homes and isolating residents, some of whom had to be airlifted to safety.

The change is attributed to new magma mixing with 1955-era magma in the ground, creating hotter and more fluid flows, scientists said.

“There’s much more stuff coming out of the ground and it’s going to produce flows that move further away,” said Wendy Stovall, a U.S. Geological Survey volcanologist.

By Saturday morning, two of 22 fissures had merged, creating a wide flow advancing at rates of up to 300 yards (274 metres) per hour. Aerial footage from the USGS showed fast-moving lava advancing to the southeast. The flow was 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometres) from the ocean, scientists said.

In the background, the footage showed lava fountaining 328 feet (100 metres) high at one of the fissures. The fountains are created by vents closing, forcing magma to burst through a single outpoint, Stovall said.

The Hilina Slump, on the flank of the Kilauea Volcano on the southeast side of the Big Island of Hawaii, is one of several "slumps" (a form of mass wasting) that ring the island, where deposits on the side of the volcano are shifting down-slope and out onto the ocean floor. Between 1990 and 1993, Global Positioning System measurements showed a southward displacement of the south flank of Kilauea up to approximately 10 centimeters per year.[2]

Despite speculation that the Hilina Slump could catastrophically collapse and generate a Pacific-wide tsunami, the U.S. Geological Survey reports that such an event is extremely unlikely because slumps are associated with a slower type of movement that is not associated with tsunamis.

...more...

Enormous sections of the Hawaiian islands have sloughed off in the past, and could easily do so again.

Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 138 (2004) 43 – 76

Extensive landslide deposits have also been mapped around ocean island volcanoes of the
Canary and Cape Verde islands (Carracedo, 1999;
Elsworth and Day, 1999) and Re´union (Duffield et al.,
1982; de Voogd et al., 1999). Catastrophic collapse of
volcano flanks has also been documented in terrestrial
settings, such as at Mount Shasta (Crandell, 1989),
Mount Rainier (Vallance and Scott, 1997) and Mount
St. Helens (Lipman and Mullineaux, 1981).
have been a significant process.
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~chriso/pubs/okubo.2004.pdf