What's beneath Hawaii's most active volcano?

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Step away from the villages and idyllic beaches of Hawaii, and you may think you've been transported to the moon. Walking along the lava flows of the Kilauea volcano, the landscape changes from a lush tropical paradise to one that's bleak and desolate, the ground gray and rippled with hardened lava. That's how Christelle Wauthier, assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences and the Institute for CyberScience at Penn State, describes it, anyway. Wauthier has been studying Kilauea volcano for several years and is getting ready to start a new project at Penn State - one using a radar imaging technique that researchers call interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) to try to peer below its surface and learn more about why the volcano is so volatile. Kilauea is the most active of the five volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaii. It's been erupting continuously since 1983, so far spewing 3.5 cubic kilometers of lava onto the surrounding landscape.