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Located on the Big Island of Hawai’i, the Kīlauea volcano threatens hundreds of homes and millions of dollars of property.
To obtain information about flow conditions before and during an eruption, Stanford scientists used millimeter-sized crystals obtained from the 1959 eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano. After analyzing the crystals, the scientists found that the crystals were oriented in a strange but surprisingly consistent pattern.
Scientists theorized that the crystals were formed by a wave within the underground magma that influenced the direction of the crystals’ flow.
Jenny Suckale, assistant professor of geophysics at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth), said: “I always suspected these crystals were far more interesting and important than we give them credit.”
When a volcano erupts, lava reaches the surface and is shocked by the colder atmospheric temperature, rapidly trapping naturally occurring olivine crystals and bubbles. The process happens so quickly that the crystals cannot grow, effectively capturing what happened during the eruption.
The new simulation, based on the Kilauea Iki crystal orientations, provides a baseline for understanding the flow of the Kilauea conduit, the tubular passage through which hot underground magma rises to the earth’s surface.
Ph.D. student Michelle DiBenedetto said, “It’s exciting to be able to use these small-scale processes to understand this huge system.”
Examination of the group shows that the strange alignment of the crystals was caused by magma moving two ways immediately, with one flow directly on the other, instead of pouring through the conduit in a constant flow.
Suckale said, “This data is important to advance our future research on these dangers because if I can measure the wave, I can limit the flow of magma – and these crystals allow me to get to that wave.”
Journal reference:
- Michelle DiBenedetto et al. The crystalline aggregates record the pre-eruptive flow field in the volcanic conduit at Kīlauea, Hawaii. DOI: 10.1126 / sciadv.abd4850
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