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

Pu‘u ‘O‘o, destructive and creative and wondrous, kept a generation of scientists busy

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Lawrence Downes is the co-author, with Linda Ronstadt, of "Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands," to be published by Heyday Books in October.
February 8, 2019 at 10:30 a.m. EST
The Pu‘u ‘O‘o vent on Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano last May, as the vent neared its end. (AP/U.S. Geological Survey)

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.