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From Seismic Signals to Volcanic Processes: Data-Driven Approaches at Piton de la Fournaise

Marie A. Gärtner 1, René Steinmann2, Michel Campillo1, Nikolai Shapiro1

  • Affiliations: 1ISTerre, CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France; 2GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany 

  • Presentation type: Poster

  • Presentation time: Monday 16:30 - 18:30, Room Poster Hall

  • Poster Board Number: 133

  • Programme No: 3.1.25

  • Theme 3 > Session 1

Abstract

Seismic earthquakes and tremors recorded in the vicinity of volcanoes capture the signature of multiple volcanic processes such as volcanic edifice deformation, magma motion, degassing, etc. However, the link between the seismic signals and the state of the volcano's plumbing system and its underlying physical processes remains poorly understood. Continuous ground motion recordings provide a comprehensive dataset to analyze the full complexity of ongoing volcanic activity over extended periods. Volcanic seismicity is often characterized by discrete event catalogs based on a priori classification schemes, which may contain significant gaps in time coverage. Here, we explore another approach based on unsupervised machine learning that enables us to discover patterns within continuous datasets without requiring predefined labels. More specifically, we extract statistically significant features of seismic signals using the scattering transform, a type of convolutional neural network, and subsequently apply the Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) to identify meaningful patterns related to the evolution of volcanic systems and various types of their activity. The active basaltic volcano Piton de la Fournaise on La Réunion, France, with more than 30 eruptions in the past decade recorded by a dense seismic network, provides an ideal data set to test and refine this methodology. We analyze ten years of three-component seismic recordings and compare the results of our analysis with complementary datasets, including earthquake and tremor catalogs, ground deformation measurements, and lava discharge rates.