For scientists, the defining quality of Hawaii’s lava is its chemistry. It’s what geologists call a basaltic lava, and this affects everything from its color to its hazards.

There are roughly two types of lava—and both types are, of course, runny and hot. Kilauea’s lava is formed by the melting of an oceanic plate, which means that it contains less silicon dioxide—the same mineral that becomes quartz—than continental plates. As such, it’s extremely runny and super hot. It also doesn’t put up much resistance to gases, which can freely pass through it. (When a continental plate melts, you get an eruption more like Mount St. Helens: That lava is stickier, and it often traps gas until it suddenly all escapes at once.)

Mika McKinnon, a geophysicist and disaster researcher, said this gives Hawaii’s lava a special characteristic: It’s “exactly like you imagine hot lava as a kid, leaping between furniture,” she told me in an email. “The geochemistry of Hawaiian lavas means [that it forms] smooth, laminar flow in snaking rivers. It’s also extremely hot, giving it that iconic fiery glow.”

That fiery glow, that childlike quality—it makes sense that some journalists have fallen back on cinema to describe the eruption. Watching videos of Kilauea’s lava, I kept thinking of the first time I ever saw lava on screen: the Cave of Wonders sequence in Disney’s Aladdin. Another science journalist—upon seeing the lava lake at the summit of Kilauea, which has brimmed with molten fire this month—recalled the cracks of Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings.

“Part of why these eruptions look familiar is that it’s easier to safely photograph and record them than faster-moving, more violent eruptions, so these images are the ones we more commonly see in kids’ science books, or inspiring artists when they’re animating movies,” McKinnon told me in an email.

“Kilauea’s lava is 1,170 degrees Celsius (or 2,140 degrees Fahrenheit) when it erupts, with the surface starting to cool within a few hundred seconds,” she said. “As it cools, it creates a crust that the lava flow breaks through over and over again.”

You can often estimate the temperature of lava by its color, she added. Yellow lava is the hottest, burning somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 degrees Celsius (about 1,830 to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit). Orange lava smolders between 800 and 1,000 degrees Celsius (about 1,500 to 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit). And red lava is actually the coolest, at 600 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,100 to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit).

But photographs taken at night are often color-corrected, throwing off this scale, McKinnon warned.

In addition to the many colors of lava, there are several types of lava that can appear during one eruption. “In Hawaiian-style eruptions, you get pahoehoe, the ropey lava that looks like a sticky river when flowing; and aʻa, with is the rubbly lava that looks like a tractor-tread of debris moving and tumbling,” said Eric Klemetti, a professor of volcanology at Dennison University, in an email. “Those differ based on things like temperature and crystal contact, as aʻa is a stickier lava.”