Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park is the only place in the national park system where you can watch new land being created in real time — where the Earth's interior is actively building an island from the ocean floor up through the surface and into the sky. The park encompasses two of the world's most active volcanoes: Kīlauea, considered Earth's most active volcano, and Mauna Loa, the largest shield volcano on Earth by volume and area — a mountain so massive it covers more than half of the Island of Hawaiʻi. The park extends from sea level at the coast to 13,679 feet at Mauna Loa's summit, passing through tropical rainforest, lava desert, subalpine shrubland, and the barren summit caldera of an active volcano in a single vertical transect that encompasses more ecological zones than most continental parks achieve over hundreds of miles.

Kīlauea has been one of the most continuously active volcanoes on Earth. From 1983 to 2018 — 35 years — it erupted nearly without pause from the East Rift Zone, adding more than 500 acres of new land to the island's southern shore and burying entire communities under lava. The 2018 eruption was catastrophic: a series of fissures opened in residential neighborhoods, destroying more than 700 homes and burying Kapoho Bay under new lava, while the summit collapsed in a series of explosions that sent ash plumes 30,000 feet into the air. After a brief pause, Kīlauea resumed erupting in December 2020 at the Halemaʻumaʻu crater — and has been erupting episodically ever since, with an ongoing eruption series that began in December 2024 producing lava fountains, active lava lakes, and tephra fallout visible across the island.

The park sits at the intersection of Hawaiian geological history and Hawaiian cultural identity. Halemaʻumaʻu crater within Kīlauea's summit caldera is the traditional home of Pelehonuamea — Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire — and has been a sacred site for Native Hawaiians for centuries. Offerings were left at the crater rim; chants recorded volcanic activity; the landscape of lava and creation was understood as the visible expression of divine force. The Hawaiian Islands were themselves created by the same hotspot beneath the Pacific Plate that continues to feed Kīlauea today — the entire island chain is a 70-million-year trail of volcanoes created as the plate moved northwestward over a stationary plume of heat rising from the mantle. The Big Island is the youngest and most southeastern, still directly over the hotspot. The next island — already forming on the ocean floor 18 miles southeast — is called Kamaʻehuakanaloa and will breach the surface in perhaps 10,000 years.