Fissure Vent

A fissure vent, or volcanic fissure, is a linear volcanic vent through which lava gushes out onto the earth surface. A fissure vent eruption usually occurs without any explosive activity. It is a few meters wide and may be many kilometers long, causing large flood basalts and lava channels. This type of volcano is usually hard to recognize from the ground and from outer space because it has no central caldera and the surface is mostly flat. A fissure vent can usually be seen as a crack in the ground or on the ocean floor. Narrow fissures can be filled in with lava that hardens. As erosion removes its surroundings, the lava mass could stand above the surface as a dyke. The dykes that feed fissures reach the surface from depths of a few kilometers. Fissures are usually found in or along rifts and rift zones, such as Iceland and the Great Rift Valley in Africa. Fissure vents are often found in shield volcanoes.

Fissure vents in Iceland are often long fissures parallel to the rift zone where lithospheric plates are diverging. Renewed eruptions generally occur from new parallel fractures offset by a few hundred to thousands of metres from the earlier fissures. This distribution of vents and voluminous eruptions of fluid basaltic lava usually build up a thick lava plateau rather than a single volcanic edifice. The Laki fissure system produced the biggest eruption on earth in historical times, in the form of a flood basalt, during the Eldgjá eruption A.D. 934, which released 19.6 km³ (4.7 mi³) of lava.

The radial fissure vents of Hawaiian volcanoes produce “curtains of fire” as lava fountains erupt along a portion of a fissure. These vents produce low ramparts of basaltic spatter on both sides of the fissure. More isolated lava fountains along the fissure produce crater rows of small spatter and cinder cones. The fragments that form a spatter cone are hot and plastic enough to weld together, while the fragments that form a cinder cone remain separate because of their lower temperature.