Dressed in heavy cotton and wearing a helmet and respirator, Jessica Ball worked the night shift monitoring fissure 8, which has been spewing fountains of lava as high as a 15-story building from a slope on Hawaii's Kilauea volcano.
The lava poured into a channel oozing toward the Pacific Ocean several miles (kilometers) away. In the eerie orange night scape in the abandoned community of Leilani Estates, it looked like it was flowing toward the scientist, but that was an optical illusion, Ball said.
"The volcano is doing what it wants to. . . . We're reminded what it's like to deal with the force of nature," said Ball, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).