Watson, EJ, Swindles, GT orcid.org/0000-0001-8039-1790, Stevenson, JA et al. (2 more authors) (2016) The transport of Icelandic volcanic ash: insights from northern European cryptotephra records. Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth, 121 (10). pp. 7177-7192. ISSN 2169-9356
Abstract
Fine ash produced during volcanic eruptions can be dispersed over a vast area, where it poses a threat to aviation, human health and infrastructure. We analyse the particle size distributions, geochemistry and glass shard morphology of 19 distal (>1000 km from source) volcanic ash deposits distributed across northern Europe, many geochemically linked to a specific volcanic eruption. The largest glass shards in the cryptotephra deposits were 250 µm (longest axis basis). For the first time, we examine the replicability and reliability of glass shard size measurements from peatland and lake archives. We identify no consistent trend in the vertical sorting of glass shards by size within lake and peat sediments. Measuring the sizes of 100 shards from the vertical sample of peak shard concentration is generally sufficient to ascertain the median shard size for a cryptotephra deposit. Lakes and peatlands in close proximity contain cryptotephras with significantly different median shard size in four out of five instances. The trend toward a greater amount of larger shards in lakes may have implications for the selection of distal sites to constrain the maximum glass shard size for modelling studies. Although the 95th percentile values for shard size generally indicate a loss of larger shards from deposits at sites farther from the volcano, due to the dynamic nature of the controls on tephra transport even during the course of one eruption there is no simple relationship between median shard size and transport distance.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | ©2016. The Authors.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative CommonsAttribution License, which permits use,distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Shard size, travel distance, probabilistic modelling, Iceland, Northern Europe |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Inst of Geophysics and Tectonics (IGT) (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Ecology & Global Change (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 06 Oct 2016 12:24 |
Last Modified: | 06 Oct 2017 20:01 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JB013350 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Geophysical Union (AGU) |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/2016JB013350 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:105574 |