EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Earthquakes indicated magma viscosity during Kīlauea’s 2018 eruption

D. C. Roman (), A. Soldati, D. B. Dingwell, B. F. Houghton and B. R. Shiro
Additional contact information
D. C. Roman: Carnegie Institution for Science
A. Soldati: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
D. B. Dingwell: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
B. F. Houghton: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
B. R. Shiro: United States Geological Survey

Nature, 2021, vol. 592, issue 7853, 237-241

Abstract: Abstract Magma viscosity strongly controls the style (for example, explosive versus effusive) of a volcanic eruption and thus its hazard potential, but can only be measured during or after an eruption. The identification of precursors indicative of magma viscosity would enable forecasting of the eruption style and the scale of associated hazards1. The unanticipated May 2018 rift intrusion and eruption of Kīlauea Volcano, Hawai‘i2 displayed exceptional chemical and thermal variability in erupted lavas, leading to unpredictable effusion rates and explosivity. Here, using an integrated analysis of seismicity and magma rheology, we show that the orientation of fault-plane solutions (which indicate a fault’s orientation and sense of movement) for earthquakes preceding and accompanying the 2018 eruption indicate a 90-degree local stress-field rotation from background, a phenomenon previously observed only at high-viscosity eruptions3, and never before at Kīlauea4–8. Experimentally obtained viscosities for 2018 products and earlier lavas from the Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō vents tightly constrain the viscosity threshold required for local stress-field reorientation. We argue that rotated fault-plane solutions in earthquake swarms at Kīlauea and other volcanoes worldwide provide an early indication that unrest involves magma of heightened viscosity, and thus real-time monitoring of the orientations of fault-plane solutions could provide critical information about the style of an impending eruption. Furthermore, our results provide insight into the fundamental nature of coupled failure and flow in complex multiphase systems.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03400-x 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:592:y:2021:i:7853:d:10.1038_s41586-021-03400-x

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03400-x

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:592:y:2021:i:7853:d:10.1038_s41586-021-03400-x