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For the first time in 38 years, Hawaii's Monoloa volcano has erupted.

It's one of a few ongoing eruptions, including Kilauea, also on Hawaii, and Indonesia's

Mount Samarro.

Spectators have flocked to view Monoloa over the last few days, as lava continues to erupt

from one of the fissures in the rock, fissure number three.

So far, no one's been injured in this eruption.

The Hawaiian Islands are situated in the middle of a huge Pacific tectonic plate.

Monoloa covers just over half of the big island of Hawaii, and it's the world's largest

active volcano.

We love to say the biggest, the longest, the largest, the whatever, but we always have to

stop and define that.

So for Monoloa, that's referring to its height, and so it comes from the bottom of the

sea floor all the way to its summit.

And so that makes it the largest on the planet that's active.

That really isn't another that can compete in the height category until you go to Mars,

and then we can talk about Olympus Mons, which is like the size of Arizona, but that's

not active.

So Monoloa still gets to be special.

Allison Gretinger studies volcanoes at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

She says that even though the recent eruption at Monoloa's made headlines, the current eruption

at Monoloa is a pretty typical one for what we'd expect for Hawaii and volcano.

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