Hydrothermal alteration of andesitic lava domes can lead to explosive volcanic behaviour

Abstract

Dome-forming volcanoes are among the most hazardous volcanoes on Earth. Magmatic outgassing can be hindered if the permeability of a lava dome is reduced, promoting pore pressure augmentation and explosive behaviour. Laboratory data show that acid-sulphate alteration, common to volcanoes worldwide, can reduce the permeability on the sample lengthscale by up to four orders of magnitude and is the result of pore- and microfracture-filling mineral precipitation. Calculations using these data demonstrate that intense alteration can reduce the equivalent permeability of a dome by two orders of magnitude, which we show using numerical modelling to be sufficient to increase pore pressure. The fragmentation criterion shows that the predicted pore pressure increase is capable of fragmenting the majority of dome-forming materials, thus promoting explosive volcanism. It is crucial that hydrothermal alteration, which develops over months to years, is monitored at dome-forming volcanoes and is incorporated into real-time hazard assessments.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Heap, MJ Troll, VR Kushnir, ARL Gilg, HA Collinson, ASD Deegan, FM Darmawan, H Seraphine, N Neuberg, J https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7866-0736 Walter, TR
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 9 October 2019 Published (online): 7 November 2019 Published: December 2019
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)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	12 Dec 2019 12:02
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2019 12:02
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Research
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-019-13102-8
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:154457

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Hydrothermal alteration of andesitic lava domes can lead to explosive volcanic behaviour

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