This is the south vent eruption of the Kīlauea volcano on December 6, 2025. With a lava fountain growing to over 1,000 feet, many dramatic photos and videos marked eruption episode 38. Only 10 days later, I had the privilege of visiting Kīlauea National Park, and this was my view from the Volcano House on December 16th.

While this was a dazzling sunset that my pitiful photography skills captured but a shameful imitation, the only orange in the photo is from the sky, which is not in short supply. Upsettingly, there was no eruption event for my family's trip.

I am no stranger to the Kīlauea YouTube livestreams that the USGS maintains for individuals with an extra affinity for volcanos to indulge 24/7, but as an individual also burdened with trivial things like eating, working, and quietly musing with scenic backdrops that rarely include volcanos, my indulgence has to be tamed.

Shortly followed was episode 39, producing similarly dramatic shots starting on the night of December 23rd.

Not only did my visit almost perfectly bisect the gap between episode 38 and 39, I even missed watching the event live on the streams that I hold so dear.

In a quiet ponder during the holidays, I thought back to a few summers ago when I was doing chores on an afternoon with a weather livestream playing in the background. All of sudden, a tornado breaks out, and the storm chasers barrel down a country road to drive through the tornado. A feeling of quiet adrenaline, paired with an appreciation for the natural world, takes over as I stop the vacuum to participate in the excitement of the storm chasers.

It is not lost on me that I can go back and watch the eruption highlights but even rewatching the clip above fails to capture the excitement I felt in the moment as I was pulled spontaneously from my chores. Watching the ESPN highlight reel is never the same as watching the game live, or I imagine it wouldn't be... I'm not sure, tornadoes are my Super Bowl.

Living in a state of woe, mourning the bygone livestreamed moments that missed me only by a single click, I thought to try and use this misery to drive a solution. A little architecture whiteboarding, followed by some hunched-over-the-laptop-on-the-couch coding on a handful of afternoons I was able to take the first step in the journey to watch more volcanos erupt live.

From this was born a platform that accepts a list of youtube livestreams and then periodically polls the livestream for a status and the current viewcount. The viewcount is interpreted as a measure into the "interest" in the stream and if there is a "anomalous" change in the viewership, something is likely happening and it could be interesting.

What quantifies an event of 'interest'? As much as I wish to have the answer to this question, the genie added another rule ad hoc. This platform is meant more of an experimentation platform for tinkering with measures to try and quantify "something's happening." Initially, there are two approaches that I've vibe-developed: quantiles and z-score, both uninteresting and have many drawbacks, such as the inability to deal with common temporal patterns.

The GitHub page has more details, but the focus is an endpoint /api/v1/livestreams?count=N to get the top N livestreams running the current anomaly detection method, which, at the time of writing, is just a basic quantile method comparing the previous few minutes of data to the 75th percentile. The service has a couple of nifty features: an admin page for stream management, an in-memory cache to reduce server load for running the anomaly detection algorithm, and an embeddable iframe that can be added anywhere, available at anomaly.lukewasbored.com.

This is an ongoing project, and I plan to continue tweaking the anomaly detection algorithm with the eventual goal to connect a notification system once I am confident in a low type 1 error rate. Having experience with noisy monitors in the past, this is going to be a long road.

Anecdotally, this has worked a few times already. Just the other day, while working on this post, I clicked over to the rankings, and this was the view I was greeted with! While this volcano has been erupting periodically, this is one less eruption missed!

I am always in the market for more livestreams that have a vague scientific feel to them. If you've got any, please leave them in the comments. Finally, thank you for my lovely girlfriend, Evyn, for the beautiful logo of the Erlenmeyer flask.