The eruptions of the Hawaiian volcanoes are thus of the effusive type.  The column of lava rises, breaks through the side of the mountain, and discharges in lava streams.  There are no explosions, and usually no earthquakes, or very slight ones, accompany the eruptions.  The lava in the calderas boils because of escaping steam, but the vapor emitted is comparatively little, and seldom hangs above the summits in heavy clouds.  We see here in its simplest form the most impressive and important fact in all volcanic action, molten rock has been driven upward to the surface from some deep-lying source.

Lava flows.  As lava issues from the side of a volcano or overflows from the summit, it flows away in a glowing stream resembling molten iron drawn white-hot from an iron furnace.  The surface of the stream soon cools and blackens, and the hard crust of nonconducting rock may grow thick and firm enough to form a tunnel, within which the fluid lava may flow far before it loses its heat to any marked degree.  Such tunnels may at last be left as caves by the draining away of the lava, and are sometimes several miles in length.

Pahoehoe and AA.  When the crust of highly fluid lava remains unbroken after its first freezing, it presents a smooth, hummocky, and ropy surface known by the Hawaiian term Pahoehoe.  On the other hand, the crust of a viscid flow may be broken and splintered as it is dragged along by the slowly moving mass beneath.  The stream then appears as a field of stones clanking and grinding on, with here and there from some chink a dull red glow or a wisp of steam.  It sets to a surface called AA, of broken, sharp-edged blocks, which is often both difficult and dangerous to traverse.

Fissure eruptions.  Some of the largest and most important outflows of lava have not been connected with volcanic cones, but have been discharged from fissures, flooding the country far and wide with molten rock.  Sheet after sheet of molten rock has been successively outpoured, and there have been built up, layer upon layer, plateaus of lava thousands of feet in thickness and many thousands of square miles in area.

Iceland.  This island plateau has been rent from time to time by fissures from which floods of lava have outpoured.  In some instances the lava discharges along the whole length of the fissure, but more often only at certain points upon it.  The Laki fissure, twenty miles long, was in eruption in 1783 for seven months.  The inundation of fluid rock which poured from it is the largest of historic record, reaching a distance of forty-seven miles and covering two hundred and twenty square miles to an average depth of a hundred feet.  At the present time the fissure is traced by a line of several hundred insignificant mounds of fragmental materials which mark where the lava issued.

The distance to which the fissure eruptions of Iceland flow on slopes extremely gentle is noteworthy.  One such stream is ninety miles in length, and another seventy miles long has a slope of little more than one half a degree.