- Preparing to Test Equipment, 1964
Description: In 1964, the first field tests using NASA space suits took place on the Bonito Lava Flow and the deep bordering cinder. Here, the crew poses alongside the equipment truck, with the Bonito Lava Flow behind them. Collection: Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. - Undercurrents
Beneath the lava you now stand on are perhaps dozens of caves. As lava flowed, the top surface cooled first due to contact with air. A hardened crust formed. Meanwhile, rivers of lava continued flowing below, periodically breaking through the crust to form the spatter cones you saw earlier. When the flows ceased, the remaining lava drained out the downhill end of the crusted-over channels, leaving behind tube-like caves. Most of these caves were sealed with hardened lava and have no openings to the surface. A collapse created the opening you see here. - Zuni Bowl
Description: Zuni bowl from the Museum of Northern Arizona gift shop. Originally acquired from the CG Wallace Collection in the 1960s. Made circa 1925. Design is comprised of geometric shapes painted in brownish/orange and dark brown on white. Dimensions: 6 in (Diam), 2.5 in (H). Collection: On display at Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument (catalog card). - Traditions
The ancestors of today’s Hopi and Zuni Indians witnessed the eruption. In some Hopi accounts, the Qa’na Katsina caused Palatsmo (Sunset Crater) to erupt after people engaged koyaanisqatsi, a life out of balance. For Hopi people, Palatsmo is a living reminder: if people stray from their religious ideals and lifeway, there may be another eruption. In Zuni traditions, stories of the eruption were carefully guarded because of the belief if people continually dwell upon negative events those events will happen.
Regardless of our worldview, places like Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument help us to better understand each other and the forces that continually affect our lives. - Zuni Bowl
Description: Zuni bowl from the Museum of Northern Arizona gift shop. Originally acquired from the CG Wallace Collection in the 1960s. Made circa 1925. Design is comprised of geometric shapes painted in brownish/orange and dark brown on white. Dimensions: 6 in (Diam), 2.5 in (H). Collection: On display at Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument (catalog card). - The Birth of a Mountain
- Volcanoes
- As Powerful as a Volcano
- cult-railnew
- Surface Currents
Looking beyond the lava and spatter in front of you, and just beyond the line of trees, can you see a reddish hill? This is an agglutinate mound or pile of welded pyroclastic material. In the early stages of the eruption, a cone began to form next to a major explosive vent. The cone became armored by welded deposits. Then a column of dense magma broke through the base of the cone, causing the upper part of the cone to collapse onto the top of the flow. The slumped pieces were then rafted away by the flowing lava. You are looking at a large piece of an early-stage cone of Sunset Crater. Perhaps within weeks or days after breaching, the cone was rebuilt, creating the symmetrical cone of Sunset Crater we see today. Any remnants of the earlier cone lie buried beneath tons of cinder. - Life and Landscape Transformed
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- Curtain of Fire
Meanwhile, lava broke out of the base of this side of the cinder cone forming the Bonito Flow all around you. The lava pooled, trapped by surrounding older volcanoes, and accumulated to perhaps 100 feet (30 m) thick during at least three separate flows. On the opposite of the cone, lava flowed more than six miles (10 km), filling a narrow valley. When the volcano coughed out its last cinders – after several months or perhaps several years – they were colored by the oxidation of iron in the magma. Similar to the way metal rusts, the magma came in contact with water-rich gasses emitted during the final stages of the eruption. These red cinders rim the top of the cone.- Eruption date: sometime between 1040 and 1100
- Height: 1,000 feet (305 m)
- Elevation at summit: 8,029 feet (2,447 m)
- Diameter at base: 1 mile (1.6 km)
- Diameter at top: 2,250 feet (868 m) from rim to rim
- Depth of crater: 300 feet (91.4 m)
- Extruded material: approximately 1 billion tons
- Extent of ashfall: approximately 800 square miles (2,072 sq km)