Perspective | Elegy for a vent in a Hawaiian volcano: It blew for 35 years. It just ceased.

Perspective Interpretation of the news based on evidence, including data, as well as anticipating how events might unfold based on past events Scientists who study Kilauea volcano in Hawaii are saying goodbye to an old friend, an eruption that many of them have known for all or most of their professional lives.The eruption was at Pu‘u ‘O‘o, a vent on the volcano’s eastern flank, which had been spewing lava, thrilling tourists, now and then burying forests and subdivisions, and slowly making the island bigger since 1983.Pu‘u ‘O‘o was like the kvetchiest relative imaginable: It vented more or less nonstop for 35 years — a staggeringly long time for an eruption — until it suddenly collapsed on April 30 last year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Reporters loved the story of the most isolated vacation rental anywhere, until it was buried, too.But Pu‘u ‘O‘o also inspired and taught and dazzled and confounded volcano scientists, who felt lucky to be alive at that time, in that place, with an eruption that was always on.On an island that is a patchwork of slumbering volcanoes, Kilauea is restless. The chances of being alive and on the job when something this volcanically spectacular happens are not great, Pu‘u ‘O‘o notwithstanding.[Hawaii has made peace with its angry volcano; not so its tsunamis, hurricanes and heating Earth]In the mid-1990s, when the Pu‘u ‘O‘o eruption was barely a decade old, it was possible to drive the whole ropy length of Chain of Craters Road in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, from the summit down to sea level, and park near the edge of an active flow.