I had a look at the crater using Google maps. Does this user contributed photo look AI to anyone? Or at least 'shopped. https://maps.app.goo.gl/or6gj5XnTCTwv4Ys7
replies(10):
* The steam from lava should be arising from where the lava hits the lava, boiling it--there's not going to be any steam from the interior of a lava tube, because all of the water will have boiled out long ago.
* It looks like somebody dumped a photo of a black rock field on top of a different image. There's a sploch of a normal tan-sand beach at the base of part of this cliffs; in recent lava activity, the lava will extend fully into the ocean and collapse. Given that the edge of the lava is a) pretty towering and yet b) some distance from the sea.
* The lava activity in the extreme foreground is pretty sketchy. It's not entirely implausible to have lava flowing into a pit like that in some fashion, but there's also no clear source from the lava, and real Hawaiian lava flows tend to look somewhat different than that.
* Lava flows downhill from a rift zone. Where's the rift zone here? It's basically a wall of black rock. Photogammetry is not my strong suit, but the presumably dried lava is towering above the treetops in the distance, and yet there's no clear sense of where the lava is flowing from.
* In the background, you see something more akin to a stratovolcano (actually, might well be an eroded granite dike or some other weird formation like that as opposed to a volcano in the first place). Hawaiian volcanoes are shield volcanoes, they don't look like that. Also, Kilauea and Mauna Loa are too active to really have the deeply-eroded look like that. You have to go to Kohala on the Big Island to get that kind of look.
* Kilauea is nowhere near the ocean. (Also, shield volcano, you can't see the top from the base.)
* There's another island clearly visible in the background. None of the Hawaiian islands are close enough to each other to generally be visible from one another! And certainly not from any view of Kilauea, which is the last volcano in the chain that's above sea level. (Loihi still has another 3,000 feet to go before it pokes above the surface.)
> None of the Hawaiian islands are close enough to each other to generally be visible from one another!
Of the Hawaiian islands usually identified as "major", Molokai, Lanai, and Kaho‘olawe are all visible from Maui, and vice versa.
Many people would probably limit the list of major islands to four. Interestingly there doesn't seem to be any official term for that grouping, other than perhaps the "main islands".