Fiber-Optic Observation of Volcanic Tremor through Floating Ice Sheet Resonance ...
Entirely covered by the Vatnajökull ice cap, Grímsvötn is among Iceland’s largest and most hazardous volcanoes. Here we demonstrate that fiber-optic sensing technology deployed on a natural floating ice resonator can detect volcanic tremor at the level of few nanostrain/s, thereby enabling a new mod...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
ETH Zurich
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000567658 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/567658 |
| Summary: | Entirely covered by the Vatnajökull ice cap, Grímsvötn is among Iceland’s largest and most hazardous volcanoes. Here we demonstrate that fiber-optic sensing technology deployed on a natural floating ice resonator can detect volcanic tremor at the level of few nanostrain/s, thereby enabling a new mode of subglacial volcano monitoring under harsh conditions. A 12.5 km long fiber-optic cable deployed on Grímsvötn in May 2021 revealed a high level of local earthquake activity, superimposed onto nearly monochromatic oscillations of the caldera. High data quality combined with dense spatial sampling identify these oscillations as flexural gravity wave resonance of the ice sheet that floats atop a subglacial lake. Although being affected by the ambient wavefield, the time–frequency characteristics of observed caldera resonance require the presence of an additional persistent driving force with temporal variations over several days, that is most plausibly explained in terms of low-frequency volcanic tremor. In ... : The Seismic Record, 2 (3) ... |
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