El Hierro and the Physics of magma chambers

Image from Nature GeoScience. From Phillip A. Allens article Geodynamics: Surface impact of mantle processes.

Part 1

Not many people think about what is great with physics. People are normally more occupied with buying Prada hand-bags to carry their rat-sized yapp-dogs than physics. The great thing with physics is that the laws of nature are universal. And with that I mean that they can be transferred easily from the school books into real life, and from one part of science into another.

I am as most of you know not a volcanologist or a geologist, but I am a physicist. So every time I try to understand a volcano I do it from how it is behaving from the point of perspective of the laws of nature.

This time I would like to write about a few things regarding how magma chambers must be formed according to physics. I will mainly not talk about magma chambers because they are fairly hard to visualize since nobody has seen one in real life as it is forming. But most of us have for instance blown up a balloon.

In this case we will be talking about magma chambers that come from hotspot volcanism; the process will be slightly different in a subduction volcano. But first we need some background, this post will be about precisely that background.

Hotspots, weightlessness and Blobs

Let us start with what is required for a magma chamber to even start forming. And as a physicist I am always talking about basic forces. And there is only one basic force, and that is energy. There are of course many types of energy, and in this case we are talking about energy as mechanical pressure and heat.

Thankfully for the poor fledgling magma chamber there is one thing that causes both pressure and heat, and that is your basic magma. So, let us drop up a ball of nice hot juicy magma from the hotspot under El Hierro.

It is not entirely clear how magma travels upwards via a hotspot, but we know there are two types of hotspots. First we have the deep Icelandic type that brings up material from the depth, this magma is hot and arrives at high (relatively) speed and with great force. It brings with it an assortment of rare and heavy metals from deep down at the boundary between the core and the mantle. The other type is a colder and less deep hotspot. The magma here is either brought up from within the mantle, or created as the hotspot heats up material close to the MOHO boundary either through heat or pressure, perhaps even a mixture between them. This type creates magma that is low in precious metals, and gives a low Uranium-Thorium (UrTh) count which in turn is a dead giveaway that it comes from a shallow source. The Canarian hotspot seems to end up somewhere in the middle of these two types, it is definitely not melting crust as a part of the magma creation, the almost pure basic basalt tells us that, on the other hand it is not from the core/mantle boundary since the UrTh count is wrong for that option. Let it suffice to say that the Canarian hotspot is a bastard mongrel of a hotspot.

So, where does now the pressure to drive any hotspot come from? Well, once again the answer is not simple. We have at least two sources. The first is heat; the Earth is producing loads of juicy heat due to at least 3 different processes. The first one is UrTh and other atomic nuclear processes. Yepp, we live on an atomic reactor. The second one a form of pressure called overburden pressure. That is the combined weight of the planet pushing downwards, this creates compression heat. The third is through the dear old gravity slowly massaging the planet, this is by far the smallest of powers creating the heat. Here I have simplified a bit, there are more forces at play than this.

Image of nested magma.

So, how come then that magma travels upwards? The answer might surprise you a lot. If you are getting a headache from this it is normal. Let us imagine that you where hanging at the exact mid-spot of the planet. The pressure would be phenomenal from the overburden pressure; still you would notice something odd. For the first time in your life you would be completely weightless. This would be due to the entire planets gravitational pull would be affecting your entire body in every direction at the same time, effectively cancelling out any gravitational effect.

What does this now have to do with magma? Well, you have magma under tremendous pressure that does not weigh a lot. A cubic decimeter of magma at the mantle/core boundary is considerably more lightweight than the same volume of water. And at the same time it is squeezed by tremendous pressure.  Here we enter a nice little simple physics, when you squeeze a fluid it will try to run away, in this case it can’t go down, it is fairly buoyant and will try to float. Now we just need one small thing, a conduit. Enter the heat.

Energy will always go from a high state to a lower state; this is the nutty little physics law that also gives that order will always go towards disorder, in other words, entropy and enthalpy. So, the core will try to lose heat, and the heat will always be able to escape, and once a convective current of heat has started to run upwards it will jolly well keep on going. When magma finds a stream of heat going upwards it will follow that stream because the fluid will follow the point of least resistance. And that is why a mantle plume and a hotspot is the same thing (simple physics). The mantle plume cannot exist without a hotspot, and the hotspot will sooner or later create the mantle plume.

Now our blob of magma is finally moving upwards towards El Hierro, the trip started a long time ago, it takes a while to go through all that semi-permeable heated pipe that runs up through the mantle. One day, let us say on the 24th of June 2012 our blob of magma arrives at the bottom of the crust under El Hierro.

The speed with which it arrives is very slow even compared to a human walking, but the weight is enormous, the same goes for the amount of heat energy and the buoyancy pressure. Let us just say that it is like a comet sized blow-torch hitting the almost melted MOHO boundary. It will cut through the first layers in a rather short time. As it goes on up through the bottom of the crust it decelerates fairly quickly, and that is the point where all the fun starts, the formation of the magma chamber.

Until the next time!

CARL

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632 thoughts on “El Hierro and the Physics of magma chambers”

    • Thanks!
      This is just part one, I still need to return to the rest of it… :)

    • Yep that’s very good, thanks Carl.
      I always appreciate some insight into the underlying principles… :)

    • I also agree. This is a very good post!

      And you used your Physics background in your best.

      Physics is really useful!

      • Hello, the post has really helped me understand why the magma has to go up …and to know for sure that somehow, someway it will eventually find a way.. So just t thinking, there is obviously a lot of magma under El Hierro looking for a way up, but the earthquakes are not getting noticably shallower but rather, deeper. Could the earthquakes actually be tectonic in nature, but becuase there is so much magma under there, it is just being swished around, and maybe there is just not enough pressure (gases etc) at the moment to actually allow the magma to be pushed up yet? If this sounds silly I apologise in advance.

    • Very good, probably the best to date. Even I could understand the math, an I am (complex) math challenged. *cheers*

  3. Hi Carl ( and all of course) did you see the comment : Richard WEI says: July 10, 2012 at 16:39?
    I think we should point to your email.

  4. I would like to start a nice discussion based on this. We have convection currents going on inside the Earth, which probably give rise to the many hotspots. In the Sun, we also have convection that leads to solar activity (but the Sun is plasma and gas), while the Earth is solid and liquid rock.

    But under the Physical principles, why does the Sun has a cycle of convection of 11 years, 22 years and even other long term cycles? And, if the Sun has these cycles, could the Earth also have these cycles on its convection and resulting hotspots? At least, we know of a ~140 years cycle of the Icelandic hotspot. But as this is little research stuff, so far the Icelandic hotspot is the only one that has a hypothesized cycle.

    Let’s us be fair discussing the possibility of these cycles without the fear of falling into a 2012-style conversation, or without fear of attracting those lunatics. There might be a waxing and waning of volcanic activity in cycles, in diverse places on the planet. Either all related or independent between each hotspot.

    • Hello Irpsit!

      First let me write this, could you please do as Henrik suggested and make a post out of your stratigraphic endevours instead of posting them as comments? I think it would make a tremendeous read, and also give a really interesting picture of how the stratigraphic ash-layer approach is done. If you agree, please post it to me in text format with the images separate.

      Back to the hotspots!
      The first image I used is a map of the larger hotspots on the planet, it is a computer modell made by numerical methods from the individual hotspots surface behaviour. It is an amazing image/map!

      I actually do not have a problem with the hotspots running on cycles. Almost all known convective currents in an open and dynamic system will exhibit cycle behaviour, the sun is actually a much simpler system than earth, so the periodicity becomes very stable.
      So, I believe that the hotspots run in cycles, and I think those cycles will be better understood with time, and as new data is uncovered either through eruptions over time, or through stratigraphic layering and other secondary evidence methods. Although I do believe that due to earths more complex dynamicity the cycles will never be as picture perfect as in the sun.

      I do though not believe that the hotspots go in global patterns like for the sun. Instead I think we should look at the convective currents in weather and in the oceans where the cycles are a more randomized due to the pseudo-randomness of the complex systems that affect them. And there seems to be precious little to support that I would be wrong on this assumption.
      Instead we find cyclicity in many hotspots, chiefly among them the Icelandic and the Hawaiian hotspots. They have fairly different sets of cycles, but they are surely there.
      Take the rifting fissure eruption cycles in Iceland, within a deviation of 1 they occur withing a rather distinct time frame in the Dead Zone. We also have the hotspot high coming at regular but slower intervals, and as those two coincide we get the rather large flood basalts in Iceland.

      I agree, we should not be afraid of the 2012ers and skip this discussion, because I think it is vital that we do find out those patterns that are there to be found.

      I would also like to point out that the University of Iceland and IMO uses there two cycles in their long term predictions of the eruptivity on Iceland. And have even issued a warning that we are entering into a the beginning of both of these cyclic highs.

    • Stellar Physics, wheee!!!

      In a star, there are two opposing forces – gravity and radiation from the nucleonic process going on inside the stellar core. As a star is formed from a gas cloud, it collapses (which is neither as fast or as dramatic as it sounds). Gravity causes it to contract and as it does so, the temperature and pressure at the star’s core rise.

      When the proto-stellar core hits a temperature of very roughly 10 million degrees Kelvin, Hydrogen fusion begins forming first deuterium and as the temparature increses tritium then helium. But at the same time, the fusion reaction releases huge amounts of energy that act against gravity, so after the initial burst, hydrogen fusion ceases until gravity again overcomes radiation pressure and fusion starts again.

      This push-pull effect goes on for as long as the star “lives” and is the reason for the Solar cycle. Enter another interesting fact, it takes energy 700,000 – yes, seven hundred thousand – years for the energy to pass from the core where it was produced to the solar “surface”. In theory, you can work out just how small the zone within the Sun where fusion occurs really is by setting the Solar cycle in relation to the time it takes for the energy to appear at the surface.

      The Earth is quite different. First of all, the fuel is heavy elements and the process fission. Whereas the Sun is almost entirely made up of hydrogen and just a small fraction of helium, the Earths interior is a mix of metals where the uranium/thorium fuel is a fraction. This means that there is no steady, continuously ongoning, huge natural reactor at the core as there is with the Sun. Inside the Earth, concentrations of U/Th vary. At times, there will be enough to start a natural reactor but it can happen anywhere, even on the surface. Thus there are a great number of spots at various locations and depths where natural reactors form.

      Because of this, it is very hard to hypothesise an “Earth cycle”. That said, it is a well-known fact that over tens and hundreds of millions of years, the output of “Hot Spots” do vary. As an example, the Icelandic one is relatively quiet now if compared with 290 MY ago when it was at the location of the Siberian Traps.

  6. Inge: in reply to your post about the ash layer study I am doing. Thanks for the tips.
    Is the settlement ash (it is 870 AC) also Torfajokull in addition to Vatnaoldum? By the way, do you know which color is the ash generally coming from Bardarbunga, Veidivotn and Vatnaoldum?

    In Skaftafell I saw one ash layer from Veidivotn and it was brown color (just like Grimsvotn). But around Veidivotn there is also a lot of black ash (probably deposits from Katla, that erupts much more often).

    I wonder if the eruptions 1000 and 2000 years ago from Hengill, Krisuvik and Langjokull also have had any ash. I know that an eruption in Reykjanes around 1220 had a lot of ash in that region.

    • Eldgja would be a rather stumping ash layer, and the same should really go for Laki.

      • Yes, these are interesting questions.

        I was going to post a large comment, but instead I will add this to my draft of a future post. Just a couple of days :)

        • I would like to this written up as a post too…
          I was strangely jealous that someone had dug you a nice square hole 10x10x3m just over the road… Around here that would have about 30cm (if you’re lucky) of top soil followed by 3m of chalk… :)

          • Yes, I understand that. In my own garden, the topsoil is also 15cm folllowed by rocks. But just a bit down the valley it is much deeper, because where I live, Hvitá river used to flow some many thousands of years ago. Up the valley, in the flat land, is where the hole is and at least the soil is deep just by looking at the hole. Yes, I was very lucky, because actually I tried digging many times in several places with a shovel to no success.

          • Ayup,
            8km west of here, it’s silty soil, clay even… Exactly the opposite problem, there they have an alluvial flood plain…

          • Yep, Schteve, and 30-40 kilometers west of you we have the London Clays with fossils galore! I have a lovely collection of sand shark teeth and even a crocodile vertebrae I dug for the clay on Bracklesham Bay sea shore. My daughter has even found two sharks teeth in the Solent Gravel i bought to cover a weedy area in the garden. I think she would find a fossil anywhere, she just has a good eye for it and loads of patience.

          • I found a shark’s toof on Brighton Beach years ago…
            One has to cross one’s eyes in a certain way x

          • LOL and ROFL. Still can’t beat Charmouth for fossils though I think, we had a chunk of Ichthyosaur, vertebrae and ribs all embedded in the hardened clay from the beach there.Well worth a visit if you are searching for fossils.

        • Irpsit. remember to take samples for Birgit to examine of each ash layer.
          Just remember to not contaminate the samples, but if I remember correctly you have an easy access to latex gloves ;)

          • Yes, I will collect that. At least from the major layers.

            Birgit : can you send your post address to volcanocafe email so that he can forward me your address. If you don’t mind of course. I think about sending samples in a normal letter envelope, because that is cheaper.

          • Hello Irpsit.

            Here is the official adress:
            Birgit Hartinger
            Ars Electronica Center
            Ars Electronica Strasse 1
            4040 LINZ
            AUSTRIA

    • @Irpsit 17:53
      There are two double-coloured ash layers in the highlands of Iceland which have a more or less time-identical origin and which were expelled after settlement. They are “markers” in tephrochronology.
      1) Vatnaöldur / Bárðarbunga from around 870 (in Iceland called “landnámslag”). It is believed that this eruption set off an eruption in Torfajökull via basalt magma intrusion in an rhyolitic magma chamber / reservoir of Torfajökull. This is the most famous ash layer of Iceland.
      The Torfajökull ash is more or less rose-coloured whereas the Vatnaöldur ash is a black one (blágrýti = Tholeiitic Basalt).
      2) Veidivötn /Bárdarbunga from around 1480. Same theory here, because Torfajökull erupted more or less at the same time. And same colours: Bárðarbunga Tholeiitic Basalt and Torfajökull again Rhyolite (rose / beige).

      You have to look for them eg. around the Búrfell reservoirs. They are rather easy to discern.

        • GVP misses quite a lot.
          GVP is more “who’s who” among the worlds volcanoes. But it is a bit short on details.

      • Inge, so did the ash from Bardarbunga and Torfajokull in 1477 and in 870 actually reached most of the southwest? That also depends on the wind, but if it reached Burfell, then it might have reached also here (Grimsnes/Selfoss area).

        Basically what I see is this:
        at 30cm and 60cm two big white layers (probably Hekla; which eruptions I am not sure)

        the first white layer is surrounded above and below by thick rose/grey layers, which then could be your 1477 and 870 ash layers. Would you confirm this? Indeed that layer has a mix rose and grey hues to it; right on spot.

        That also means that the first white (Hekla) layer would have occurred between 870 and 1477. Somewhat below all these layers, there is the lowest and second white ash layer (which is the largest). I think it would be Hekla 3, about 2800 years ago. Do you also agree?

        I am going now to the hole just to measure it more acccurately.

        • OK, the Vatnaoldum 870 ash reached the southwest, the paper speaks about it.
          I now need to confirm whether the 1477 ash reached also the southwest. That way I confirm both. And actually they have a double layer pattern (rose below, dark ash above)
          Birgit, if she can, would confirm the nature of each.

          • Between them you should have a large layer of white ash, that is mainly the large H1 tephra from Heklas last large eruption in 1104.
            The H1 eruption is the last of the eruptions in the old pattern when Hekla erupted rarely but hugely. Most of the eruptions before thatlisted in GVP is Vatnafjöll eruptions, not Hekla eruptions. And those lavas are much darker and of a completely different type than the andesitic series of Hekla.
            Why Hekla had a change in behaviour that large is anyones guess, even as good a question as at what happened in and after the 1947 eruption when Hekla put in the overdrive…

            The white layer before the 870 ash should be a fairly thin set of white layers from the 800 and 650 AD eruptions. The next large one should be after jumping all the way back to 1150BC, then you have the VEI-5+ H3 tephra. Yepp, no Hekla eruption for almost 1700 years.

  7. @Lucas Wilson, there should be 3 bombs in your mailbox. Tell me if one the packages did not arrive. That would be 2 mails and 3 packages.

    • Two pair of my shoes have just disintegrated with all the rain and damp I am also fed up of the grey clouds and rain .

      • Hi Judith, am I going mad, or are you not in Fuerteventura? What rain & damp? Or am I sane, and you are just sympathising with minilurker? :)

  11. Well just for the fun here is my new Desktop image.

    http://eruptionelhierro.blogspot.fr/2012/07/just-for-fun-gridding-for-all-eq.html

    I got this with some gridding of ALL the EQ since June 2011 up to yesterday. Correlation is “nearest”, gridding is @ 0.0009° so about 100 m. Took half an hour on my laptop (Pentium960 2.2 Ghz, 4GB mem for info, do not know if it’s worth a thing)
    I do not think is has scientific value, but I like the look of it !

    More “serious” things to come though

      • No, it was the big Hawaiian volcano – in the 1970′s. Awesome photographs and film.

      • Did you ever write that post?

        The one with the scaled Laki image?

        (I do think I need to redo the magma temps at ≈1150°C rather than 1600°C)

        • I still can’t get my head around the 1150 temperature.
          What I would love to have is a piece of quenched lava from Laki.

          Why?
          When lava is suddenly dumped into water it chrystalises in specific patters according to the temperature before being dumped, chrystals get more ordered the higher the temp was. That would give us real temperatures.

  13. By the way, some researchers can be really funny. Maybe without meaning to.
    This quote made me laugh out loud: “(…) the seismic rate induced by a single mother.” :)

    From “Foreshocks explained by cascades of triggered seismicity”.

    • Have they started to translate textbooks in geoloy with Giggle Translate now?
      That is totally en par with the hysterical translations it produces when going from spanish to english.

      • One can almost believe that. I am at least continuously giggling while reading this paper.
        In reality they just defined any quake a possible “mother” and any quakes triggered by it as its “daughters” or “offsprings”.

        • It kind of makes sense, but why not initial and secondary quakes? It is after all kind of what they are called as a standard… :)

          • No idea, it would be easier. :) I believe the authors are German so I assume it is because of that, or interesting humor. Maybe both..

          • Oh my, interesting german scientific humor, it can be cryptic indeed. Kant comes to mind.

          • I was going to suggest Erich von Däniken. But then I realized he is swiss, even if he sometimes write in german.

          • And one should never confuse von Däniken with a scientist.
            I will never forget when he came out of the Tunisian dessert to tell the world that he, Erich von Däniken, had found a space ship.
            And the world press arrived predictably for this world news item. And lo and behold, there was something really odd out there in the dessert. So, the reporters was writing reports, and the photographers was photographing. At least untill one of the photgraphers kids pulled daddies pants and said the immortal words…
            “Look dad, it is the sandcrawler from Star Wars, are we on Tatooine now?”

            Exit Erich von Däniken stage left…

          • He became known as Erich fån Dönicken as early as the 70s. Swedish “fån” = fool, idiot, madman, loony. “Dönicke” = deadhead, lamebrain.

          • Either a weirdly formed stone or an old soviet portable sub marine base. Take your pick.

          • Däniken is not a scientist, but he’s swiss. But why being swiss makes is special that he writes in german? He actually is swiss german. We have 4 languages in our little country. Teached at school… Applied to all our administrative processes… Read the NZZ for example – would like to see a german paper write something you could prove to be better than that from a linguistic point of view… Or take “le temps” – no need to hide compared to french journalists. Aaah, I leave that path. Bit sensitive – rid of the clichés the german and french like to have about us and our languages. It’s not a nationality thing, but belongs to an individual to know how to use words on not. Some can talk, others not – you have each of them everywhere… Language rant off.
            I have visited von Däniken’s Mystery Park some years ago. It was too expensive, and loads of not too accurate stuff. But somehow that made if funny. You know, when you come in and know everything better… Then there’s one thing I have to let that kind of “specialist”: their books are sold and read. Make a serious publication of scientific facts – pfffff, nearly no one that will read it. Write a bunch of crappy mystery ideas and you’ll become a millionaire. Who’s the fool? The one researching for 4-5 years to bring out an accurate documentation and ending up eating 3-day old bread, or the other one putting some crap into 50 pages, takeing 6 month, and making millions? Sometimes I wish I had no self-esteem and could write some bullshit, make some money out of that crap and my kids would have daddy more at home than if I go on running around playing serious…
            Fuck the world’s population that follows idiots rather than people with sense and good hearts. We diserve december 2012 and all the experiments the lizards are gonna do on us! And if one german comes telling anything about language I’ll tell him/her to teach his people the correct use of “war gewesen”. All the germans they show on RTL have quite a problem with that… :-)

          • And I who thought I was the epitome of correct german since I know, and will never forget untill the day I die, the timeless school-book phrase:
            “Ihre möve ist todt.”
            I will though never know why that sentence is mandatory knowledge in the German language here in Sweden.
            One would have thought it should have been “You can find mooses to the left”.

          • “Secrets of Our Spaceship Moon” by Don Wilson with the sub-heading of “The NASA Cover-up”

            There’s another nutter for you.

  14. After a 15km and a 16m quake at Pinar it seems like we have a tinsy winsy bit of harmonic tremor and some nice magmatic earthquake signatures.
    Click between spectral and waveform and it will be a bit clearer. If, and it is still so weak, it is harmonic tremor it would be the first spotted one this time around.
    Once again, it is so weak that I can have mistaken it.
    http://www.01.ign.es/ign/head/volcaSenalesDiasAnterioresHora.do?nombreFichero=CHIE_2012-07-10_19-20&estacion=CHIE&Anio=2012&Mes=07&Dia=10&tipo=2&hora=19-20

      • We have almost passed the pressure gradient, that is why we are not seeing any uplift any longer. I am though going to be a bit mean and not explain myself untill the next post.

          • Well.. if you consider that it hasn’t returned to where it started…. definitely.

            As for continuing, the next step I would take would be to run a trend line and get an upper and lower bounds and watch to see if it stays with in the error zone on the next few marks. As long as it does, you can’t rule it out.

          • And… if the NS and EW keep moving… as they seem to be, that supports the flexing crust / sliding island idea, warping the crust as it slips along… ever so slowly.

    • It seems like it is there, but very weak indeed.
      I do not think it will amount to much though. Probably a little bit of a pre-run.
      Will be interesting to see what happens next time pressure is high enough.

  15. Just had a good laugh at the ‘Climate House’ exhibition in Bremerhaven. A poster described Samoa being of volcanic origin, but its volcanoes are extinct, because the last eruption is over 100 years ago.

    • :lol: – wishful thinking! Even something that hasn’t erupted for thousands or tens of thousands of years could still do so. For something to be truly extinct, it would have had to be quiescent for many tens, preferably hundreds, of thousands of years.

      Thanks for sharing the laugh Chryphia!

      • There is absolutly nothing going on at Thingmuli volcano. I repeat, there is absolutly no eruption happening at this moment at Thingmuli.
        *grave stone face*

        • Except Icelandite, an aluminium-poor, iron-rich variety of andesite considered a separate species by “The Saint”, a Professor Carmichael in the 1970s.

          • I think Carmichaeks ground breaking book was released in 1962…
            I have a copy of it on my bedside table. In it’s own unassuming way it is the Principia Naturalis of volcanology. Please do note the olivine progression series in Thingmuli. Really wild progression of magmas that was erupted there. Going from basalt to andesite. And it get even weirder. As the hotspot is moving towards the east it will hit Thingmuli and most likely reactivate it. I would not want to be around when that happens.

  16. And the small and slow quake “swarm” at Skjaldbreid continues.
    Interesting spot and depth, all of them around between 9 and 6km, and stacked neatly ontop of each other.
    Wonder if Irpsits favourite volcano (or sub-volcano) will not put in an appearance.

  17. Just watched Volcan olive,
    The interview with the guy who welded the pipes to pump the seawater through on Heimay in 1973 brought a tear to my eye. What an amazing story…

    • Oh no! Not another person calling it Volcan olive!!! You obviously share the same strange sense of humour as my husband. ;) Mind you, he only does it to wind me up.
      Schteve, were you not old enough to see the news at the time when these events were happening in Heimay? I remember watching in awe as the news showed them pouring countless gallons of seawater on that lava and saving their harbour from what looked to be complete destruction. Am I showing my age here I wonder? What the heck if I am, it was a wonderful moment of history in the making.

        • Yep so do I. I was totally fascinated by it and still follow any web pages I can get about the progress of the island and the increasingly diverse ecosystem. Just totally fascinating to see how quickly life has colonised a barren volcanic island!

      • Hi Newby x
        Didn’t have internet or TV when this was going on (even the radio was “muffled”) x I was a bit more than a twinkle in my dad’s eye though :)

  18. Carl, very good post, easy to understand, fascinating subject.
    Looking forward to the next installments.
    And BTW, is there not a lacking post on Italian calderas? I saw CF, Ischia, Vesuvius… and shouldn’t there be yet another?
    Oh, yes, and I think Irpsit could put all his comments together and make a twofold post as well – maybe one about Katla’s “steam plumes” (well this was a joke), but really, he has more material about Iceland than this recent Geo-toy finding.

    • I must have missed one because I only recall the introductory post, Vesuvius and Ischia ones. Using the search function, I can’t find a post on CF – but I have every confidence that Carl will post it. ;)

      • Me and Lizzie are off to Naples in September, for a week… It wasn’t a terribly difficult compromise; I wanted volcanoes and Lizzie wanted Italy… :D
        Pretty inexpensive, though possibly a bit rough and ready, it ticks all the boxes x

        • You lucky man ! don’t forget the Solfatara, it is a camping ground. The arenas of Pouzzoles are worth a look and the temples at Paestum and … and…too many things to see…

      • They are in the making, I am just saving the continueation for a less El Hierran day.
        As a group they are perfect for when it is calmer among the volcanoes that we take a special interest in.

    • There are 3 missing posts:
      Vesuvius the famous Eruption.
      Camping Flagrant.
      And Pantelleria. I know, this one is technically not a Naples volcano, but it is even larger than the Naples ones, and if it goes off on a big scale I would seriously run for the hills wherever I was around the mediterranean.

    • Argh I just read that and the Daily Fail journalist has mixed up cosmic ray particles with neutrinos. What a horrible mess of an article! Still, thanks for the llink because it is useful to know about the actual neutrino detector. I wonder how much damage cosmic rays do to the apparatus?!! :-)

      • Cosmic rays make spectacularly little damage to earth based equipment.
        You could run things for thousands of years without it doing any damage.

  20. ‎1156016 10/07/2012 19:24:11 27.7028 -18.1092 22 2.3 mbLg SW FRONTERA.IHI [+]
    1156017 10/07/2012 19:21:38 27.7097 -18.1069 22 2.2 mbLg SW FRONTERA.IHI [+]
    1156019 10/07/2012 19:11:12 27.6860 -18.1019 22 2.0 mbLg W EL PINAR.IHI [+]
    1156020 10/07/2012 19:10:03 27.6943 -18.1084 22 2.1 mbLg SW FRONTERA todos a 22 km

    ign.es

  23. Great post, Carl. Thank you for making it simple enough that a novice like me can understand. Looking forward to part 2.

  24. What a Night! First Volcano Live with superb close up footage of Puyehue erupting and the magnificent obsidian lava flow and now This post by Carl.
    My learning curve is going through the roof. I always hated Physics at school, but now with carl’s help I understand so much more. The dry stuff I learned in musty school books is now becoming alive by way of the internet.
    Life is truly exciting and the world’s mechanisms utterly amazing.

      • I knew you were going to like it. The problem with us, biologists, is not the Physics, it is the Maths. That one was the culprit of my detachment from Biological Sciences – from the moment when I had to go a step deeper into the Maths.
        Carl knows how to play it lightly on us!
        (Please Lurking, that was not directed towards you! Your plots have the power to allow us visualize what numbers alone can’t )

          • That was long ago, when there were no PCs and stuff that we had to calculate manually.
            I started in Genetics , but ended up in Botany and Ecology.
            Theatre took me away from my beloved sciences.
            I’m back. Sturdily, but I’m back, as an amateur.

        • Renato- I have a similar background- got a degree in General Biology-then went into
          Aviation. Keep my finger in the science pie however..Trying mighitly to get back to aviation
          and flying Airtankers again-”dropping slimy red mud on buring trees from antique aeroplanes..”

      • Thank you!
        I aim to please.

        I hate what schools do to physics, for me it is a wonderfull set of tools to pick apart and look into pretty much any wonder in the world.
        Thankfully physicists are marvelous at writing books explaining what they are doing and the latest ideas in simplified form. It all started with Einstein who wrote a fantastic little book where he through analogies and mental pictures described into minute detail how the theories of relativity works.
        I used that one a year when I was teaching ninth graders physics. After one year they could debate relativistic physics in nauseating and accurate detail.

        Everyone should really read it. Just skip any part containing the math, it is not essential in any way. Physicist joke (warning very obscure). I want a Lorentz rug in my Minkowski room.

        Einstein, Albert
        Relativity: The special and general theory

        Free Download:
        http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/einstein/works/1910s/relative/index.htm

  27. @ Irpsit I am really intrigued with your “Find”. I look forward to reading more about your ash layers. Will you be able to make a time line of all the eruptions ? That would be most useful because then I will get a good picture of when all the various Icelandic eruptions I have read about happened in relation to each other. Historical dates were never my strong point at school! Numbers and Maths again :D

  29. 2 EQ at 2.11 guess at around 2 and 2.21 around 3, won’t know the settings until they show up on chart

  30. the HT chart shows the EA, but the list doesn’t, the local graph seems to show the ones on the HT chart,?, so the lst one would be under Tang…..it had the same signature as the 3.8 yesterday but not as high

  32. I’ve run into the term “buoyancy flux” as a magma plume model parameter. No explanation and perfectly opaque to me is the TermWiki definition:

    “The vertical kinematic flux of virtual potential temperature, which when multiplied by the buoyancy parameter (g/Tv) yields a flux that is proportional to buoyancy” http://www.termwiki.com/EN:buoyancy_flux

    Wah!! Virtual potential temperature?? Buoyancy I get. Buoyancy flux does not compute.

    Any physicist out there care to put that in terms understandable to a normal scientist/engineer?

    • My favorite hate word is “proactive.” Anytime someone uses it I immediately count them up as an idiot.

        • My first encounter of it was in a tasking message. They give the guidelines of how you conduct operations for.. whatever the grouping is for. It’s a pretty important message and whoever has control of that aspect of the taskgroup puts out the message. This thing was a standard message, nothing abnormal… other than the liberal us of the word. The guy in charge of that messaged flew out to the different ships to discuss the finer details with the different shops.

          The brunt of his conversation? That he wrote the message. That was pretty much it. We didn’t have any questions and other than the fact that he wrote it, we didn’t gain any more enlightenment as to what was to be done.

          Other than the overuse of the word, it was a pretty good tasking message… I guess. If I’m on the stack and I get a threat signal, you can bet your ass I’m not gonna sit there and ponder it. I’m gonna tell God and creation that we are in a world of shit and that someone better get off their ass and look at it.

          No need to tell me to be “proactive” in my search.

      • I would think… that flux… in buoyancy, would be changes in buoyancy, or the variations in buoyancy.

        Or… the forward lookout could holler down to Combat “Hey! There’s a man on that bouy!” when spotting a California Sea Lion on a channel marker, and mistaking it for a guy in a wetsuit. In combat, we sat puzzled at the way that phrase came across the speaker.

        Then we realized he said bouy, and not boy.

        • To me flux is flow not gradient….though I guess related.

          It seems to be a standard parameter in buoyant fluid behavior like magma plumes but I can’t get my head around it. Has units of kg/s*s.

          I’m not going to lose sleep over it

          • Then it is how fast the bouyancy is changing.

            Just like acceleration from gravity is in m/s*s.

            In freefall, speed increases at 9.8m/s every second.

          • Okay, getting less obtuse. The “kinematic flux of virtual potential temperature” had me derailed. For now I’ll take it on faith that that makes sense.

          • Ohhhh! Flux… A lovely old word borrowed from the Romans….Fluxus… To flow. No need for gradients if you have THE BLOODY FLUX…you know, well. your innards know , Flux means flowing. You certainly don’t feel bouyant about it :green:
            My Favourite of all time…….
            I was involved with the planning and building of a small museum in the town where I lived then. I was on the Local History Committee and we were studying the architect’s plans. By each door was the word PI…… The only time I had seen this word was in relation to circles. .Pi R squared…….Nobody else was commenting on it…. It was like the Emperor’s new clothes. Nobody wanted to look foolish and stupid.
            The following week we met with the architect. Timidly, feeling foolish and very blonde I asked……” Errrm! Are all the door’s normal or are they revolving?”
            Everyone looked at me….”Errrmmm Pi……On the plans”…..I pointed.
            I was given a scathing glare….
            “P….I…… Pedestrian Inhibitors” snapped the architect….” Doors…. that’s what they are. Pedestrian Inhibitors”

    • Change of buoyance over time and space.
      It is about how the buoyancy changes as the object is moving upwards. The change can be due to heat change, compressional change, and so fort and so on.

      Lurking had it, the proactive gave the person away explaining it…

    • Also, it is a predictive calculation.
      So, you calculate it to get a statistic value for which parameters it would be within due to unknowns.
      If you are doing a modell you could equally well just skip the imaginary numbers of predictive statistical maths.

  34. I better go and feed the motley’s so the can drink before their water freezes tonight

    • everything is fine, I just refreshed everything, there is still a bit missing just before 3am, other then that it is ‘normal’, I checked Gran Canaria they are fine too, it gives one a better handle on what is going on, if you look close enough you can see fluctuations in the HT, the scales for EH are 1.5 just showing, tht is at this point in time

  36. Carl, before you issue Part II make sure you check out a new paper from Leif Karlstrom, Maxwell Rudolph and Michael Manga published in Nature Geoscience June 2012. If necessary I can scan it in an email it to you or you could try emailing the author leif@berkeley.edu.

    Great paper, the upshot is that a chamber of crystal mush has enough internal stability to behave like a solid until eruption starts (this cannot be true in all cases by the way as I know for one that there was a lot of convective mixing going on before the Oranui eruption), but as the eruption starts a yield surface spreads through the chamber, marking the boundary between liquid and solid behavior. Definitely worth checking out.

      • I have subscriptions to almost all papers on the planet…
        I’ve read the paper, it is actually unusually good.

        • you lucky sod! How do you manage to get them all covered and still run a business… I’m a complete failure on that front (business though is flourishing :grin: )

          now, where’s that book about time management.. somewhere deep down under these heap of papers here somewhere…

          • Nah… I’ve just retained my old faculty member pass, so I can still get the papers through the local university library. And that same pass also works electronically… I am a devious bastard.

          • And, nowadays I am mainly only sitting at various boards, so I have quite a lot of spare time.

          • I downloaded the prospectus for the OU geosciences course yesterday… I’m just waiting to drink enough shiraz to fill out the application form. My wife is going to kill me when she gets back.

          • No, she will of course beat you a bit. But in private she will be happy that you are volcanosexual and get foamy mouthed over volcanoes instead of blond bimbos…

          • um, I’m not so sure. See, she is blond. (what’s the html code for italics here).

            so you sit on various boards.. hm, that means you are one of the unlucky people who actually has to read all the financial stuff I translate… please tell me you actually do read it!

          • I do read the reports, and I remember but too well how it was to write them. Did my share of being a CEO before. Nowadays I mainly sit on boards of my own companies, but with a couple of exceptions.

            Believe me, women love to laugh at our silly interests. And tell us exactly how moroonic we are having them. Remember, time we are not looking at women is a boon to them. Same goes for our nutty toys. A man with his head inside a steam car is not looking at women…

  38. Morning

    Here is the video update with the Earthquakes for July 10th. The focus seems to be going back east, near the spot where some “mancha” was seen a few days ago.
    I do not think there is a link however as the EQs stay deep.
    As as the number of EQ is few, the definition gets lower. Please look at the value on the side bar, usually we have values around 5 or more and this time we go as low as 1.8.

    So I have modified the resolution and instead of incrementing by 0.006° (around 700 m) I did a computation with 0.01 (more like 1300 m). You can compare the difference by looking at the pics on the previous post if you like.

    http://eruptionelhierro.blogspot.fr/2012/07/video-update-up-to-july-10th.html

  39. Just got one of these pathetic emails that help us all believe we are special and great. But got me smiling, so I share. Oh dear, off topic again? Rhaaaaa, nothing’s easy. Let’s say it talks of fish, and fish die if water get’s poisoned by some volcanic action, so, somehow, fish is always related to volcanoes… Ehm, whatever… Here we go:
    “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it’s stupid.”
    Now isn’t that cute? Should be seconded by a picture of some baby fur-fish or something. Salmotrutta capillaris puella.
    Peace and love. Wheeere peeeeace will leaead the lavaaaaa, and loooove, will guiuiuide the bombs – this is the dawning of the aaaage of magmarius, aage of magmariuuuuuuuuus…..
    Not crazy. Loco…
    Sorry. I mean, nearly. Somehow.

    • Well, I know we New Zealanders always like to be the first (part of our perennial inferiority complex vis a vis the rest of the world) but… well you did ask for it:

      • You can bring whatever crosses your mind in here, there will always be some smart-ass reaction.
        Fan tas tic! :-)
        I just checked up how much it would cost to make a helicopter licence in my mad country. Clearly over 100’000.- Euro. Titty fucking son of a well known interstellar power – that’s really much. Does anyone know how much this would cost somewhere else? I’ll plan my next holiday in the country where I can do it in 3 weeks for less thant 10’000 bucks…

        • 5 bottles of Vodka and a 100€ for the teaching, and the 10 000€ and you get an old Hind helicopter and your certificate in Ukraine… Getting the weapons removed costs extra.

          • Oh, we just could leave the weapons where they are. You never know if there are some hippies or something to chase away from somewhere – good exercice while waiting for the lizards…
            So, kids, next year we go to Ukraine…

          • Don’t kill the hippies, the Green Lizzard’s are violently allergic to them. Just remember what happened when Bush saw a hippie in Tokyo. He emediatly barfed in the lap of the Japanese prime minister.

            Video evidence:

  40. Up above Henrik mentioned professor Carmichael after I had mentioned Icelands weirdest volcano, if not the weirdest on the planet. Thingmuli, the only known volcano that has progressed from a regular hotspot basalt volcano into a andesitic subduction volcano.
    Carmichael is the Newton of modern volcanology and Thingmuli is the proverbial Apple that fell on Newtons lower head as he was peeing on the tree.

    http://wiki.web.ru/images/7/78/Carmichael64.pdf

    Obituary
    http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/pid/10669;jsessionid=16490C95DFEBAA9AC6C4BB8000D4FC76

    Main work (book, nah, the Bible)
    Ignaeous Petrology, Ian S. E. Carmichael

    • Good grief, I honestly thought you were using Thingmuli as a variation of Thingy-me-bob as a play on Bob and all that. I had no idea it was a real volcano.

      • Nope, Thingmuli is actually one of my top 5 favourite volcanoes. Both for being so weird, and also because it is the volcano where modern analytical petrology and volcanology was born. The paper I sited above is the Theory of Relativity in Volcanology, every paper is either before or after that momentous publication.

        • @ Bruce Stout

          Carl like’s unusual volcanoes. What about Laderello?. If you were there you wouldn’t think it was a volcano until someone tells you.

          • Lucas have a point, I can’t tell apart 90 percent of the Philippine volcanoes. But I know the top weirdo volcanoes in detail.
            Perhap’s I have evolved from a volcanoholic to a volcano conneisseur. :)

          • Laderello has actually been a very important volcano. It was the location of the first ever geothermal power plant. And when it last erupteed in around 1282, it was there first ever written description of a phreatic eruption.

          • Just put this into Google Maps and it will take you almost to the spot.
            Continue dead east and you have a mountain, that is thingmuli. GM shows the end of a radial fissure.
            Thingmúli, Austurland, Ísland

          • @ Carl, Thingmuli is one of the smallest volcanoes i’ve ever seen.

            It looks like a small, eroded stratovolcano with a fissure extending west from it.

          • Lucas, you missed that I wrote, dead east of the spot that Google Maps point to.
            Google Maps is pointing to a radial fissure for some reason. The mountain to the east is part of an old volcanic arc.
            But Thingmuli is ancient, it is a tertiery heavily eroded volcano however you look at it. It since quite a time shares the status with the dodo.
            But, when the Hotspot has moved over it will most likely reactivate. There are signs that the range is reactivating allready in the southern end. Thingmuli is part of the same arc as for instance Esjufjöll.

        • @Carl, Larderello is not in the Phillipines
          Country: Italy
          Volcano Number: 0101-001
          Volcano Type: Explosion craters
          Volcano Status: Historical
          Last Known Eruption: 1282 (in or before)
          Summit Elevation: 500? m 1,640 feet
          Latitude: 43.25°N 43°15’0″N
          Longitude: 10.87°E 10°52’0″E

          Larderello, one of the world’s most productive geothermal areas, is located in the southern part of the Tuscany region of Italy. This extensive solfatara field lies in an area underlain by sediments of Eocene-to-Pliocene age. The geothermal activity is considered to be related to a cooling granitic pluton of Pliocene age beneath sedimentary and metamorphic rocks ranging from Paleozoic to Tertiary age, although the area is cut by faults with hydrothermal mineralization related to Pliocene-to-Quaternary Tuscan magmatism. The only surficial morphological manifestation of volcanism is a series of about a dozen explosion craters 30-250 m in diameter. The Lago Vecchienna crater, now filled by a 250-m-wide lake, ejected blocks and ash during a phreatic eruption in about 1282 AD (Marinelli, 1969).

          • Ursh, where on earth did I ever say that Larderello is in the Phillipines???

            I said that I can’t separate the Philippina volcanoes from each other. not that I could not separate the far far far fewer active Italian one.

    • Thanks for link, at least the idea of that paper is stated, unfortunately paypal is not my friend…

    • It would be a fairly futile experiment since Iceland have to many of them.
      Every other week a new one crops up in here.
      As Iceland has progressed volcanoes have kind of grown over each other there. I would estimate that the run of volcanoes on Iceland grows into the thousands if one would even give it a try. And of them just the central volcanoes would be somewhere between 500 and a thousand.

      • Poor Irpsit!
        Would though have the bonus of having added information on how to walk up and down of them in a Blizzard :)
        I think we would have to plan a scientific multi-year campaign to cover and get all of the Icelandic volcanoes. The project is fairly mind-boggling really.

        • I see a mental picture of hundreds of volcanoholics walking in a long line 50 meters apart in a search grid pattern. Summer after summer untill all of Iceland had been covered. Of course followed by a few geologists to help out classifying the volcanoes that we find every day that nobody knew about.
          And every year we would puclish a new band of the ever expanding:
          Complete Encyclopedia Volcanica of Iceland

          • We could use Geoloco’s new helicopter for the gravimetric over view (and neutralising hostile hollywood film crews!!) and the steam car for ground based geophysics (we would have to compensate for the large lump of iron mind!!), that should help narrow the search a bit… :D

          • They really love their volcanoes in Pakhistan.
            For the rest, Pakhistan has the smallest known volcano ever, the Thor Zawar. It was so minute that they put it on a flatbed truck and carted it off in one piece to the capital and held a party for it. And no, this is not a joke…
            So, now they have another mini volcano.
            The most likely reason for these mini volcanoes is that they are of a fourth type of volcanism beside hotspot, rifting (MAR as example) and subduction arc volcanism. I would tentatively call it for Compressional Melt Volcanoes. Basic Idea is that the compression energy in the area reaches such a high level that pure piezo electric induction happens and lava is created in very small pockets close to the surface. It also explains the high silicate content.
            Piezo electricity is caused as silicates are pressurised.

          • Could we say tensional volcanism?

            As i understand, the Kunlun Volcanic’s formed in this way (which are not far away from this other Kashmir volcano).

            I also think i’ve seen eroded cones in this valley volcano.

          • I would guess that it could work as a tentative model for the entire range.
            The pressure is huge, and there is a lot of silicates there.

          • Uhm Urs, Paracutin is pretty much exactly on the other side of the planet from Pakistan.
            It is in Mexico, and Mexico is in the mid americas.
            Pakistan is on the spot where the Indian continent slams into the Eurasian continent cause the Himalayas to fold up.
            Paricutin is definitly a normal andesitic subduction volcano with no resemblance to the Pakistani electro-volcanoes.

            I am actually starting to believe that the micro volcanoes in pakistan actually are piezo electric. Probably loads of strange phenomena going there.

          • I meant, Paracutin came out of ‘nowhere’ so why not in Pakistan, big words are interesting

  44. Well let me know which one they discover this week.

    Two years ago, a new volcano was discovered in South America (see below)

    New Active Rhyolitic Eruption Centers, Eastern Foot
    of the Ecuadorian Andes
    HALL, Minard D.1; MOTHES, Patricia A.1
    1. Instituto Geofísico, Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito /Ecuador
    mhall@igepn.edu.ec
    Within the recently recognized Ecuadorian rhyolitic
    province (ERP) (Mothes and Hall, 2008; Hall and Mothes,
    2009) and adjacent to the active andesitic volcanic
    chain of Ecuador’s eastern cordillera, the discovery of
    the young Aliso volcanic complex at the eastern foot of
    the Andes extends the ERP 40 kms eastwards. There,
    it is separated from the Back-Arc alkaline volcanic zone
    only by an active tectonic fault zone (TFZ) that displaces
    the Northern Andean Block from the South American
    plate. The Aliso volcanic complex has a rough horseshoe-
    shaped edifice, 20 km in diameter, that is drained
    eastwards by deep river valleys. Aliso’s higher elevations
    (max. 4300m) were glaciated in the Pleistocene,
    however today a sub-tropical cloud forest prevails at its
    lower elevations (min. 1800m). The edifice’s west flank
    remains inaccessible, but aerial photos show it to consist
    of many volcanic flow units inclined gently to the west.
    Along the eastern limits of the edifice where it is cut by
    the TFZ, five previously unrecognized volcanic centers
    are found (approx. 77º56’W; 0º33’S). Two of these, the
    Machangara and Cosanga centers, erupted basic pyroxene
    andesitic lavas (57.5% SiO2 – 2.6% K2O) that
    form isolated, flat-topped ridges between major valleys,
    apparently related to an early Aliso eruptive period. The
    other three centers, Holocene and Late Pleistocene in
    age, have only 800-1200m of relief, dome-like morphology,
    and occur only within the TFZ. Rhyolitic domes
    and dome-collapse deposits, ignimbrites, lava flows of
    Si-andesites and dacites, lahars deposits, and their reworked
    products are all recognized; biotite-amphibolesanidine
    are common minerals. From north to south
    these centers include El Dorado (74% SiO2 – 4.3%
    K2O), Huevo de Chivo (76% SiO2 – 4.4% K2O), and
    Pumayacu (lavas: 61-66% SiO2 – 4.3% K2O and tephra:
    75% SiO2 – 5% K2O). Pumayacu’s latest eruption
    post-dates 2000y old cultural remains; it is an important
    source of obsidian found in nearby archaeological
    excavations. A biotite-hornblende granitic intrusion of
    mid-Pleistocene age outcrops in the NE corner of the
    complex and appears to be chemically related to the
    volcanic rocks.

    • In one week I found 5 new volcanoes in Iceland…
      1 was close to the Haukadalur SIL-station, heavilly eroded but emitting sulphuric compounds into a the small lake of Íllavatn (Bad Water).
      And no less then 4 volcanoes in the Grimsvötn line. My favourites there where the two Geirvörtur volcanoes (Geirvörtur = Nipples).

    • Why not? It seems like they have checked it out fairly well. I guess that it is quite like Thor Zawar.

  47. BBGN, I am off to watch the Tour de force, I need some r and r, been cleaning the pantry, most of it, rats stink rrrr, the rest tomorrow, all holes done in pantry and bathroom with steel wool, plastered, caught about 7 of them, the cats had a good feed, so hopefully back to normal

      • the first 10 days of July all have been minus, this is winter, that is why the blighters come inside

        BBGN or should I say GM

  48. I now have a clearer overview of the ash layers I have been studying. Not that I have identified them all, but looking at several places in the hole, you see the layers are basically the same everywhere and how deep they are is also consistent. This is good news. Now the challenge (and that will be part of the future post discussion) is in identifying them.
    I took samples already for Birgit, but I will go there after lunch to take some more ash of smaller layers.

    • I know nothing but it seems to me that it might perhaps be worth taking ash samples from top, middle and bottom of any thick layers of ash to see if Birgit can show if there are changes over the course of the deposition? Looking forward to the post :)

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