Volcano monitoring with magnetic measurements: a simulation of eruptions at axial seamount, Kilauea, Baroarbunga, and Mount Saint Helens

• Published in: Geophysical Research Letters
• Main Authors: Biasi, Joseph, Tivey, Maurice A., Fluegel, Bailey
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Geophysical Union 2022
• Subjects: Magnetism; Volcanic hazards; Hawaii; Iceland; Volcanology; Monitoring
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/29771

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Biasi, J., Tivey, M., & Fluegel, B. Volcano monitoring with magnetic measurements: a simulation of eruptions at axial seamount, Kilauea, Baroarbunga, and Mount Saint Helens. Geophysical Research Letters, 49(17), (2022): e2022GL100006, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL100006. Monitoring of active volcanic systems is a challenging task due in part to the trade-offs between collection of high-quality data from multiple techniques and the high costs of acquiring such data. Here we show that magnetic data can be used to monitor volcanoes by producing similar data to gravimetric techniques at significantly lower cost. The premise of this technique is that magma and wall rock above the Curie temperature are magnetically “transparent,” but not stationary within the crust. Subsurface movements of magma can affect the crustal magnetic field measured at the surface. We construct highly simplified magnetic models of four volcanic systems: Mount Saint Helens (1980), Axial Seamount (2015–2020), Kīlauea (2018), and Bárðarbunga (2014). In all cases, observed or inferred changes to the magmatic system would have been detectable by modern magnetometers. Magnetic monitoring could become common practice at many volcanoes, particularly in developing nations with high volcanic risk. This work was supported by the NSF Grant No 2052963 to J. Biasi and an internal Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution grant to M. Tivey.