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Increased magma recharge at Sakurajima over the past 500 years

Christian Huber1, Atsushi Toramaru2

  • Affiliations: 1 Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA 2 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

  • Presentation type: Poster

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

  • Poster Board Number: 189

  • Programme No: 3.2.12

  • Theme 3 > Session 2

Abstract

The rate of magma supply to a subvolcanic reservoir exerts a primary control over volcanic unrest and potentially a forthcoming eruption. While it has been possible to infer changes in supply rate over time scales up to a few decades with the advent of GPS, tiltmeters and satellite interferometry, inferring changes in supply rate over longer timescales remains challenging. In this study, we constrain changes in magma supply rate at Sakurajima (Kyushu Island) over the past 5 centuries using a combination of thermo-mechanical modeling, documented eruption history and textural analyses of pumices. We find that the magma supply rate at Sakurajima has increased by roughly an order of magnitude over the last 500 years and that the bubble content in the magma chamber has increased over time, explaining the changes in eruption volume between the Bunmei (~1470 AD), An-ei (~1780 AD) and Taisho (1914) eruptions.