Photos of the ongoing, lava-oozing eruption at Kilauea volcano have been going viral for days. Less attention-grabbing—but equally informative—are the images NASA’s been capturing from hundreds of miles up.
On Monday, the space agency released the image above, assembled from data captured on May 6 by a thermal imaging camera aboard the Terra satellite. It shows heat signatures (yellow and green) from newly-formed fissures and lava flows in Kilauea’s East Rift Zone, underscoring that the volcano is producing a truly epic amount of heat for it to be so plainly visible from 443 miles up. Take that, drone footage.
Another image captured the same day shows plumes of sulfur dioxide gas—also in yellow and green—from the summit crater and newly-opened fissures near Leilani Estates wafting across the island and out to sea.
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