22 years of satellite imagery reveal a major destabilization structure at Piton de la Fournaise

Quentin Dumont (), Valérie Cayol, Jean-Luc Froger and Aline Peltier
Additional contact information
Quentin Dumont: CNRS, IRD, OPGC, Laboratoire Magmas et Volcans
Valérie Cayol: CNRS, IRD, OPGC, Laboratoire Magmas et Volcans
Jean-Luc Froger: CNRS, IRD, OPGC, Laboratoire Magmas et Volcans
Aline Peltier: Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, CNRS

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Volcanic activity can induce flank failure, sometimes generating large earthquakes and tsunamis. However, the failure structures have never been fully characterized and the failure mechanism is still debated. Magmatic activity is a possible trigger, either through fault slip, which might be induced by dyke intrusions, or through sill intrusions, which might be undergoing coeval normal displacements and slip. At the Piton de la Fournaise volcano, satellite imagery combined with inverse modeling highlights the pathways of 57 magmatic intrusions that took place between 1998 and 2020. We show that a major arcuate dyke intrusion zone is connected at depth to a sill intrusion zone, which becomes a fault zone towards the sea, forming a spoon-shaped structure. Some sills are affected by coeval normal displacement and seaward slip. Overall, the structure is characterized by a continuum of displacement from no slip, to sheared sills and finally pure slip. Repeated intrusions into this spoon-shaped structure could trigger catastrophic collapses.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30109-w Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-30109-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-30109-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().