Estimating volcanic plume heights from depositional clast size
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Abstract:
[1] Tephra deposits retain a considerable amount of information about the nature of volcanic eruptions, with plume height commonly inferred from maximum clast size measurements. However, current methods for inferring plume height from maximum clast size lose some of the accuracy in measurements made in the field and have limited application when trying to constrain the uncertainty in these parameters. Here a predictive numerical model is used to determine plume height from maximum clast size found in a deposit. Plume height is an essential parameter for inferring eruption magnitude as it is explicitly related to mass eruption rate. We investigate the effects of different atmospheric and wind profiles, allowing the input conditions to be location specific for each eruption. The use of a predictive model reduces the uncertainty in determining plume height as it retains the detail of measurements made in the field and incorporates the uncertainty in these measurements in the results, in the form of a probability distribution. We have applied this approach to fall deposits from the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo, one of the few Plinian eruptions in which the true height of the plume is well known. The predicted plume heights are in good agreement with those found from satellite measurements. This new approach provides a method for determining plume height from poorly preserved fall deposits, from which a limited amount of data can be sampled leading to large uncertainties in the field measurements.Keywords:
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In the historic period, several large eruptions were recorded from Kirishima, Sakurajima and Kaimondake volcanoes in southern Kyushu, Japan. Estimated dates of volcanic activity were established on these volcanoes through historical documentation of major eruption events. This study presents the correspondence between these documents and the records of AMS 14 C dating of soils underlying tephra layers. We conclude that AMS 14 C dates of soil materials can be useful in correlating tephra layers with documentary records of eruption.
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The explosion at the Buncefield oil depot in Hertfordshire, UK on 11 December 2005 produced the largest fire in Europe since the Second World War. The magnitude of the fire and the scale of the resulting plume thus present a stringent test of any mathematical model of buoyant plumes. A large-eddy simulation of the Boussinesq equations with suitable initial conditions is shown to reproduce the characteristics of the observed plume; both the height of the plume above the source and the direction of the downwind spread agree with the observations. This supports the use of the Boussinesq assumption, even for such a powerful plume as the one generated by the Buncefield fire. The presence of a realistic water vapour profile does not lead to significant additional latent heating of the plume, but does lead to a small increase in the final rise height of the plume due to the increased buoyancy provided by the water vapour. Our simulations include the interaction of radiation with the aerosol in the plume, and reproduce the observed optical thickness of the plume and the reduction of solar radiation reaching the ground. Far downwind of the source, solar radiation is shown to play a role in lofting the laterally spreading plume, but the manner in which it does so depends on the aerosol concentration. In the case of high aerosol concentration, the thickness of the plume increases; the incoming solar radiation is absorbed over such a small depth that only the top of the plume is lofted upwards and the level of maximum concentration remains almost unchanged relative to the case with no radiation. When the aerosol concentration is low, the whole plume is heated by the incoming solar radiation and the lofting is more coherent, with the result that the level of maximum concentration increases relative to the case with no radiation, but the thickness of the plume increases only slightly.
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Large-Eddy Simulation
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Abstract Measurements of volcanic tephra fallout deposits provide useful information about the magnitude and intensity of explosive volcanic eruptions and potential for remobilization of deposits as dangerous volcanic flows. However, gathering information in the vicinity of erupting craters is extremely dangerous, and moreover, it is often quite difficult to determine deposit thickness proximal to volcanic craters because the thickness of the deposit is too great to easily measure; thus, airborne remote sensing technologies have generally been utilized during the intermission between eruptions. As an alternative tool, a muographic tephra deposit monitoring system was developed in this work. Here we report the performance of this system by applying the muographic data acquired at Sakurajima volcano, Japan as an example. By assuming the average density of the deposit was 2.0 g cm −3 , the deposit thicknesses measured with muography were in agreement with the airborne results, indicating that volcanic fallout built up within the upper river basin, showed its potential for monitoring the episodic tephra fallouts even during eruptions.
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The Indonesian Young Toba Tuff (YTT), classically dated around 74 ka BP, is considered as a short-lived explosive cataclysmic super-eruption. The huge amounts of ash and SO2 emitted are likely to have triggered a volcanic winter which accelerated the transition to the last glaciation, and may have induced a human genetic bottleneck. However, the global climatic impact of the YTT or its duration are hotly debated. The present work offers a new interpretation of the Toba volcanic complex eruptive history. Analysing the BAR94-25 marine core proximal to the Toba volcanic center and combining it with high-resolution tephrostratigraphy and δ18O stratigraphy, we show that the Toba complex produced a volcanic succession that consists of at least 17 distinct layers of tephra and cryptotephra. Textural and geochemical analyses show that the tephra layers can be divided in 3 main successive volcanic activity phases (VAP1 to VAP3) over a period of ~ 50 kyr. The main volcanic activity phase, VAP2, including the YTT, is likely composed of 6 eruptive events in an interval whose total duration is ~ 10 ka. Thus, we suggest that the eruptive model of the Toba volcano must be revised as the duration of the Toba volcanic activity was much longer than suggested by previous studies. The implications of re-estimating the emission rate and the dispersion of ashes and SO2 include global environmental reconstitutions, climate change modelling and possibly human migration and evolution.
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Volcanic plumes, discharging from craters or fumaroles, are usually observed at active volcanoes. These plumes are divided into two categories from their appearance; one is a transparent invisible plume, composed of volcanic gases, and the other is a white, visible plume, containing water droplets in addition to the vapors. The difference in plume visibility is caused by changes in the conditions that control water condensation in the plume. We present a simple model describing the condition for the water condensation in the plume as a function of the exit temperature, volcanic gas composition, atmospheric temperature and humidity, and tested the model with a field observation. The result indicates that we can estimate the exit temperature from the visibility of the plume under known atmospheric conditions.
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A steady state bubble‐plume model is evaluated using full‐scale temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen data collected in a Swiss lake. The data revealed a plume‐generated near‐field environment that differed significantly from the ambient far‐field water column properties. A near‐field torus of reduced stratification developed around the plume, the extent of which is on the same lateral scale as the horizontal dislocations generated by persistent first‐mode seiching. The plume fallback water was found to penetrate much deeper than expected, thereby maintaining reduced vertical gradients in the near‐field torus. The plume entrains a portion of the fallback water leading to short‐circuiting, which generates a complex plume‐lake interaction and reduces far‐field downwelling relative to the upward plume flow. As the integral plume model incorporates the entrainment hypothesis, it is highly sensitive to the near‐field environmental conditions. After identifying appropriate near‐field boundary conditions the plume model predictions agree well with the field observations.
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Entrainment (biomusicology)
Stratification (seeds)
Downwelling
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Line (geometry)
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Integral plume theory is used to demonstrate how tracer data from the vicinity of a “hot smoker” plume may be used to infer the heat flux emanating from the source of the plume.
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