Pele continues her search southeastward down the Hawaiian island chain, testing and being flooded out in turn on each successively younger island, Kauai, Oahu, Molokai, Maui, until she finally reaches Hawaii Island itself, whose volcanoes, including Kilauea, are high and active enough that the fire she establishes there can no longer be reached and extinguished by her sister's pursuing sea. At Halemaumau crater on Kilauea, Pele makes her lasting home, and Hawaiian tradition continues to treat the volcano as her living residence and eruptions as expressions of her presence and temperament rather than as separate natural events unconnected to her.
Geologists studying the Hawaiian island chain independently confirm that its islands do grow progressively younger and more volcanically active from northwest to southeast, the product of the Pacific tectonic plate moving steadily over a stationary hot spot in the earth's mantle, a pattern that corresponds closely to the sequence of Pele's testing and flight recorded in Martha Beckwith's foundational study of Hawaiian mythology, though the tradition itself explains the pattern entirely through Pele's journey and her sister's pursuit rather than through plate tectonics, two accounts of the same geological sequence operating on wholly different terms.