How Earth Builds Supereruption-Feeding Magma Systems

“As the system resets, the deposits become shallower,” said Gualda, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences. “The crust is getting warmer and weaker, so magma can lodge itself at shallower levels.”

What’s more, the dynamic nature of the Taupo Volcanic Zone’s crust made it more likely for the magma to erupt than be stored in the crust. The more frequent, smaller eruptions, which each produced 50 to 150 cubic kilometers of magma, likely prevented a supereruption. Supereruptions produce more than 450 cubic kilometers of magma and they affect the earth’s climate for years following the eruption.

“You have magma sitting there that’s crystal-poor, melt-rich for few decades, maybe 100 years, and then it erupts,” Gualda said. “Then another magma body is established, but we don’t know how gradually that body assembles. It’s a period in which you’re increasing the amount of melt in the crust.”

The question that remains is how long it took for these crystal-rich magma bodies to assemble between eruptions. It could be thousands of years, Gualda said, but he believes it’s shorter than that.

His findings are in a paper titled “Climbing the crustal ladder: Magma storage-depth evolution during a volcanic flare-up,” which appears today in the journal Science Advances.

This work was made possible through National Science Foundation grant EAR-1151337.

Contacts and sources:
 Heidi Hall
Vanderbilt University

Citation: Climbing the crustal ladder: Magma storage-depth evolution during a volcanic flare-up.
Guilherme A. R. Gualda, Darren M. Gravley, Michelle Connor, Brooke Hollmann, Ayla S. Pamukcu, Florence Bégué, Mark S. Ghiorso, Chad D. Deering. Science Advances, 2018; 4 (10): eaap7567 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aap7567