Triggering of volcanic eruptions

Alan T. Linde () and I. Selwyn Sacks
Additional contact information
Alan T. Linde: Carnegie Institution of Washington
I. Selwyn Sacks: Carnegie Institution of Washington

Nature, 1998, vol. 395, issue 6705, 888-890

Abstract: Abstract Although earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are each manifestations of large-scale tectonic plate and mantle motions, it is usually thought that the occurrences of these events are not directly related. There have been some studies, however, in which triggering of volcanic eruptions by earthquakes (remote from the volcano) has been proposed1,2. The 1992 Landers (southern California) earthquake caused triggered seismicity at very large distances3, including the magmatically active4 Long Valley caldera region which also experienced a significant coincident deformation transient5. Motivated by this demonstration of the ability of a distant earthquake to disturb a volcanic system, and the earlier studies of specific cases of eruption triggering, we examine here the historical record of eruptions and earthquakes to see if there are indeed significantly more eruptions immediately following large earthquakes. We find that within a day or two of large earthquakes there are many more eruptions within a range of 750 km than would otherwise be expected. Additionally, it is well known6 that volcanoes separated by hundreds of kilometres frequently erupt in unison; the characteristics of such eruption pairs are also consistent with the hypothesis that the second eruption is triggered by earthquakes associated with the first.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/27650 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nature:v:395:y:1998:i:6705:d:10.1038_27650

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

DOI: 10.1038/27650

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

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