Scientific Report 980
This report is also available as a PDF document .
Abstract
The original objectives of this proposal were
- To make a tomographic image of the low-velocity, hot or/or melt-bearing bodies beneath Askja central volcano in the northern rift zone of Iceland;
- To constrain the crustal and upper mantle velocity structure, including anisotropy beneath the northern rift zone and the Vatnajökull region using ambient noise and surface waves;
- To map seismicity caused by melt movement beneath the five active volcanoes currently lying beneath the Vatnajökull ice cap.
All three objectives have been achieved, and published, with more papers in preparation. A separate scientific report (loan 968) covers the first objective. To save repetition, I here report on the last two objectives. Loan 980 of 20 seismometers supplemented 26 6TD and ESP seismometers purchased by Cambridge University and deployed on this project. During summer 2014 to summer 2015 the array was also supplemented by 15 Guralp 6TDs from SEIS-UK under loan 1022 extension deployed to monitor the Holuhraun eruption.
Background
Tomographic imaging of volcanoes is an important tool in understanding the distribution of melt below the surface because molten rock strongly reduces the seismic velocity. S-waves are especially sensitive to temperatures and the presence of melt because S-waves cannot travel through liquid. Even small percentages of melt will change the bulk properties and depress the seismic velocity. We used ambient noise to constrain the shear velocity structure beneath Iceland.
Seismicity caused by melt movement along a 48 km long dyke during the Bardarbunga Holuhraun intrusion and eruption was captured spectacularly well by our array. We have also identified and mapped a vertical melt feed from 20 km deep in the crust up to the depth of the dyke. Vatnaj kull is located above the central part of the Eastern rift zone in Iceland. This marks the location of the plate spreading boundary between the North American and Eurasian plates where it passes through Iceland.
Survey procedure
The seismic data was recorded continuously at 100 sps with continuous GPS. Almost continuous daylight in summer (this is near the Arctic circle), together with the use of large truck batteries (typically 3 x 115 Amp-hrs) and multiple solar panels on each site (typically 80 watts), provided sufficient power supply through both the summer and winter months to keep the seismometers operating continuously. Solar panels are mounted sub-vertically to reduce snow adherence in the wetter spring months and to catch the low angle returning sun (Fig. 2). The GPS antenna is attached to the top of the stand so that it above the snow cover. We bury the batteries and solar panel regulators, but mount the breakout box on a short stick: this is because when they are buried, they are more prone to becoming flooded as the snow melts. It is also easier to access the sockets for servicing. 6TD seismometers were buried directly (in plastic bags), while for ESPs we built a small underground vault using fish barrels and concreted base, with drainage (Fig. 3).
The prevalence of basaltic rocks means that compasses are unreliable indicators of true north, so we used GPS to orient the seismometers. It is best to use a differential GPS receiver, but when that was not available we found that a normal hand-held GPS unit could be used equally well. We took a fix at the seismometer and then walked quickly 100-200 metres either north or south (depending on the terrain) and erected a pole at that point to provide a visual pointer for aligning the seismometer. At these high latitudes there is excellent satellite coverage, and provided little time was spent in locating the position for the pointer (by simply keeping the longitude on the GPS the same as you walked), the normal time-varying positional errors in the GPS were minimised to less than the practical accuracy of aligning the seismometer.
A 16 Gbyte seismometer typically filled the memory in 10.5 months, so we serviced the array twice: once in early July, which is the earliest we could access the area; and again in early September. This also gave us the opportunity to replace any failing components at the sites (we found the GPS antennae to be often the most likely component to fail during deployments).
The ambient noise tomography across Vatnaj kull required multiple crossing ray-paths. Figure 4 shows the seismometer array used for the tomography during its peak period in 2014-15. An advantage of the ambient noise method is that paths between pairs of receivers can simply be added into the final stacks without requiring the whole array to be operational simultaneously.
Data quality
The data quality is extremely good, particularly in the winter. This is because the ground is frozen, so the buried seismometers are coupled to the ground extremely well. There is no cultural noise, and the lack of vegetation means that there is no noise induced, for example by wind blowing trees. The snow cover decouples the ground somewhat from wind shear.
Processing and modelling
This multi-network ambient noise tomography study uses continuous broadband seismic data from a total of 232 (non-simultaneous) seismic stations across Iceland (Figure 1). 144 stations are part of an ongoing deployment in central and east Iceland, operated by the University of Cambridge and University of Iceland, and this array is augmented by 48 permanent sites from the monitoring network of the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO), and 3 sites from the IMAGE project Reykjanes Ridge experiment. To supplement this, additional archive data from a summer deployment at Eyjafjallaj kull volcano and the HOTSPOT experiment of 1996 98 [25] were collated and reprocessed to extend coverage to the margins of Iceland.
Ambient noise analysis involves the cross correlation of long term seismic noise to reconstruct a Noise Correlation function (NCF) which is an estimate of the earth response between two stations. Wavespeed observations, most commonly surface wave dispersion, are then measured for interstation NCFs and used to determine tomographic velocity maps. Our methods are similar to those laid out in Bensen et al. (2007). Continuous vertical component records at 1 Hz sampling rate were split into day-long records, and then demeaned, detrended and tapered and the instrument response was removed to displacement. The mean station pair data record length was 390 days, with 755 pairs having data records longer than 2 years.
Interpretation of ambient noise tomography [see Green et al., 2017 for full details]
The continuous band of low velocities constrain a 50 km wide rift. The most volcanically active regions show very low velocities, in particular beneath the Vatnajökull icecap, and the highly active Eastern Volcanic Zone. These regions must have been active for a relatively long time, as short-lived intrusion events for which we know the dates do not have an associated seismic velocity perturbation. The melt is likely to be widely distributed as low percentage melt, rather than large melt bodies. The distribution of earthquakes and seismic velocity anomalies beneath Askja (report 968) are suggestive of a complex magmatic plumbing system with melt distributed throughout the crust (Figure 6). Melt is currently being actively intruded into a number of discrete locations in the mid-crust, rather than at a single storage reservoir beneath the central volcano.
Interpretation of melt under Vatnajökull [see Hudson et al., 2017 and Ágústsdóttir et al, 2016 for full details and for movies in the Supplementary Information]
Over a 13 day period in 2014 magma propagated laterally from the sub-glacial B r arbunga volcano in the northern rift zone, Iceland. It created > 30,000 earthquakes at 57 km depth along a 48 km path before erupting on 29 August 2014 (black dots, Figure 7a). The seismicity, which tracked the dike propagation, advanced in short bursts at 0.3 4.7 km/h separated by pauses of up to 81 hours. During each surge forward, seismicity behind the dike tip dropped. Moment tensor solutions from the leading edge show exclusively left-lateral strike-slip faulting sub-parallel to the advancing dike tip, releasing accumulated strain deficit in the brittle layer of the rift zone. Behind the leading edge, both left- and right-lateral strike-slip earthquakes are observed. The lack of non-double-couple earthquakes implies that the dike opening was aseismic.
We have also mapped the magma plumbing beneath Bardarbunga over a four year period 2013-2016 which encompasses the Holuhraun dyke intrusion and eruption. Microseismicity was recorded in a narrow sub-vertical column extending from 7-22 km depth (Figure 7b) (Hudson et al., 2017). Moment tensor solutions from these deep earthquakes exhibit opening tensile crack behaviour. This is consistent with the deep seismicity being caused by melt movement through the normally aseismic ductile crust. The seismically inferred melt path from the mantle source is offset laterally from the centre of the Bardarbunga caldera by ~12 km, rather than lying directly beneath it. It is likely that an aseismic melt feed supplies the shallow magma chamber at c. 7 km depth that lies directly beneath the caldera, and is aseismic due to the elevated temperatures and pervasive partial melt under the caldera.
Conclusions and recommendations
We have collected and assimilated a large dataset of continuous broadband seismic data for ambient noise analysis, and implemented a careful quality control procedure to remove poor quality data and to estimate uncertainty in the Rayleigh wave group velocities. Our high resolution model of the shear velocity structure of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Iceland displays an excellent spatial correlation of low seismic velocities within the active rift zones, and faster velocities in the older, cooler, less fractured, non-volcanically-active crust. This image reveals an oceanic rift with a continuous plumbing system feeding all three volcanic rift zones of the plate boundary in Iceland. Strong cores of the low-velocity anomalies are focussed under Katla and north-west Vatnaj kull, and are possibly related to a broad region of partial melt under these large volcanic complexes, suggesting a concentrated delivery of melt into the crust at these locations. Shear wave velocity profiles of both on-rift and off-rift regions show a high velocity-gradient upper crust of 8 10 km thickness. Below this, shear velocities increase with a lower velocity-gradient, and in the on-rift region the crustal shear velocities are depressed between depths of 10 20 km.
Over 30,000 brittle failure earthquakes delineate the path of a 48 km lateral dyke beneath the Vatnaj kull ice cap at 6 km depth feeding the Holuhraun eruption. A persistent feed of melt subvertically through the crust has been identified just outside the Bardarbunga caldera.
At the time of writing we are analysing the anisotropy of the crust from local and regional events and making a tomographic image of the magma chamber beneath Bardarbunga using P and S body wave arrivals.
Location of archived data
The raw and miniseed data are archived at Bullard Laboratories, Cambridge University on two different RAID arrays in different buildings, and also at SEIS-UK. The data will be uploaded to IRIS in August 2019, 3 years after the end of the loan. In the meantime, we are collaborating and providing this data for research with several researchers in other countries (Germany, Belgium, Estonia, Iceland, Ireland and France).
The locations of all the microearthquakes we have identified are published in Supplementary Information of Ágústsdóttir et al. (2016) [approx. 30,000 events from the Bardarbunga dyke], in Greenfield et al. [approx. 70,000 events from the Askja-Herðubreið area], and in Hudson et al. (2017), where they are publicly available for download.
Text Citations
Bensen GD, Ritzwoller MH, Barmin MP, Levshin AL, Lin F, Moschetti MP, et al. Processing seismic ambient noise data to obtain reliable broad-band surface wave dispersion measurements. Geophys J. Int. 2007 Jun;169,1239–1260.
Refereed publications using data from this loan
Ágústsdóttir, T., Woods, J., Greenfield, T., Green, R. G., White, R. S., Winder, T., Brandsdóttir, B., Steinthórsson, S. & Soosalu, H. (2016). Strike-slip faulting during the 2014 Bárðarbunga-Holuhraun dike Intrusion, central Iceland. Geophysical Research Letters, plus Supplementary Information, 43, 1495‒1503, doi: 10.1002/2015GL067423
Caudron, C., White, R. S., Green, R. G., Woods, J., Ágústsdóttir, T., Donaldson, C., Greenfield, T., Rivalta, E. & Brandsdóttir, B. Seismic amplitude ratio analysis of the Bárðarbunga-Holuhraun dike propagation and eruption, Journal of Geophysical Research, in press.
Green, R.G., White, R.S. & Greenfield, T. (2014). Bookshelf faulting in the north Iceland volcanic rift zone, Nature Geoscience,7, 29‒33, plus Supplementary Information, doi: 10.1038/NGEO2012
Green, R. G., Greenfield, T. & White, R. S. (2015). Triggered earthquakes suppressed by an evolving stress shadow from a propagating dyke, Nature Geoscience, 8, 629‒632, doi: 10.1038/NGEO2491
Green, R. G., Priestley, K. F. & White, R. S. (2017). Ambient noise tomography reveals upper crustal structure of Icelandic rifts, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 466, 20–31, doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2017.02.039
Greenfield, T. & White, R. S. (2015). Building Icelandic igneous crust by repeated melt injections, Journal of Geophysical Research, doi: 10.1002/2015JB012009
Greenfield, T., White, R. S. & Roecker, S. (2016). The magmatic plumbing system of the Askja central volcano, Iceland as imaged by seismic tomography, Journal of Geophysical Research, 121, doi: 10.1002/2016JB013163
Hudson, T. S., White, R. S., Greenfield, T., Ágústsdóttir, T., Brisbourne,A. & Green, R. G. (2017). Deep crustal melt plumbing of Bárðarbunga volcano, Iceland, Geophysical Research Letters, 44, doi: 10.1002/2017GL074749
Jenkins, J. S., Cottaar, S., White, R. S. & Deuss, A. (2016). Depressed mantle discontinuities beneath Iceland: Evidence of a garnet controlled 660 km discontinuity? Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 433 (2016) 159–168, doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2015.10.053
Jenkins, J., Maclennan, J., Green, R. G., Cottaar, C. & White, R. S. Crustal formation on a spreading ridge above a mantle plume: receiver function imaging of the Icelandic crust, Journal of Geophysical Research, Solid Earth, submitted.
Pugh, D. J., White, R.S. & Christie, P.A.F. (2016). Automatic Bayesian polarity determination, Geophysical Journal International, doi: 10.1093/gji/ggw146
Pugh, D. J., White, R.S. & Christie, P.A.F. (2016). A Bayesian method for microseismic source inversion, Geophysical Journal International, doi: 10.1093/gji/ggw186
Sigmundsson, Freysteinn, Hooper, Andy, Hreinsdóttir, Sigrún, Vogfjord, Kristín, Ófeigsson, Benedikt, Heimisson, Elías Rafn, Dumont, Stéphanie, Parks, Michelle, Spaans, Karsten, Guðmundsson, Gunnar B., Drouin, Vincent, Árnadóttir, Thóra, Jónsdóttir, Kristín, Guðmundsson, Magnús Tumi, Högnadóttir, Thórdís, Friðriksdóttir, Hildur María, Hensch, Martin, Einarsson, Páll, Magnússon, Eyjólfur, Samsonov, Sergey, Brandsdóttir, Bryndís, White, Robert S., Ágústsdóttir, Thorbjörg, Greenfield, Timothy, Green, Robert G. et al. (2015). Segmented lateral dyke growth in a rifting event at Bárðarbunga volcanic system, Iceland, Nature, 517, 191‒195, doi:10.1038/nature14111
PhD Dissertations
2015 David Pugh - Bayesian source inversion of microseismic events 2016 Tim Greenfield - The velocity structure and micro-seismicity of Askja central volcano, Iceland 2016 Robert Green - The structure and seismicity of Icelandic rifts 2017 Jenny Jenkins - Mantle interfaces beneath Iceland
Conference Abstracts
We have published over 100 conference abstracts using the seismometers from this loan, and there is not space here to list them all. But the results are contained in the theses and refereed publications listed above which are all publicly available.
