When residents of Hawaii fled the massive eruption of the Kilauea volcano in May 2018, volcanologist Cheryl Gansecki and colleagues grabbed a homemade metal shield, tough boots, and shovels. The blast was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do some amazing science—the Super Bowl of volcanoes.

Today, Gansecki and two other squads of scientists have published their findings from that extraordinary eruption, which lasted four months, destroyed 700 homes, and forced several thousand people to evacuate. The three papers published today in the journal Science give a deeper understanding of Kilauea’s underground plumbing system and explain how the caldera collapsed before the eruption began.

Gansecki, at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, has been studying volcanoes her entire career, and Kilauea in particular for the past 23 years. So as the lava poured across the eastern part of the Big Island, Gansecki donned her boots, a protective suit, and a mask, and lugged a shovel and hunk of metal roofing out onto the hardened sections of the flow. There she and a partner shoveled lava into a bucket of water to cool it down, while a third colleague kept a lookout for exploding balls of fire.

“Collecting lava is the fun part,” she says. (Not everyone may agree, but she loves volcanoes so much she even developed an eruption-predicting board game with her husband, also a volcanologist.)

Looking into the lava lake at Kilauea's summit on May 6, before the caldera began to collapse. Photograph: Kyle Anderson/U.S. Geological Survey

For catching samples in the big rivers of lava, the team deployed a long pole and chain with a metal hook on the end, “like fishing,” Gansecki says. These big rivers of lava sometimes flowed 20 mph for more than 25 miles.

As part of her study, Gansecki and her team used a near real-time geochemical monitoring system to forecast when the lava was about to shift in consistency from thick, molasses-like flows to a super-hot river of fire. By figuring out the lava’s temperature quickly, they were able to provide important data to emergency response officials about its speed—and level of threat. It was the first time such a rapid monitoring system was used during a volcanic eruption.

The key was differentiating between older, slower-moving lava oozing through cracks and fissures in the Earth and fresher, hotter lava that likely was being pumped up from far below the surface. (The term magma refers to molten rock stored underground; it’s called lava when it emerges on the surface.)