Abstract
In the period from August 29, 2014, to February 27, 2015, the largest basaltic eruption of the last 200 years in Iceland occurred within the tectonic fissure swarm between the Bárðarbunga-Veiðivötn and the Askja volcanic systems. The eruption took place in the Holuhraun lava field, 45 km northeast of the Bárðarbunga volcano and 20 km south of the Askja volcano. It emplaced over 1.2 km3 dense rock equivalent (DRE) of lava in an area of very low topographic relief. In light of the minimal topographic forcing, lava flow emplacement can be viewed as having been effectively controlled by the lava’s temperature-dependent rheology. Here we combine field and remote sensing data collected during the week of the 17th to 22nd of November 2014 to constrain the lava’s flow path, its velocity, deformation rate and thermal evolution during emplacement. We combine these with measurements of the pure liquid viscosity and the sub-liquidus rheological evolution of the lava during crystallization. Sub-liquidus experiments were performed at a range of constant cooling and shear rates, to mimic the conditions experienced by the lava during emplacement. These data can also be used to infer flow conditions of partly degassed magma within dike-swarms during transport towards the surface. The data show that the effective viscosity of the lava drastically increases until reaching a specific sub-liquidus temperature, the “rheological cutoff temperature” (T cutoff). This departure to high viscosity is a consequence of the onset of crystallization and is found to be primarily controlled by the imposed cooling rate. Our data indicate that shear rate exerts a second-order effect on this rheological departure and T cutoff. We discuss the experimental dataset in the context of the reconstructions of the natural emplacement conditions and describe the implications for the 2014–2015 lava flow field at Holuhraun as well as lava flow modelling in general.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the editors Katharine Cashman and James White as well as two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments that helped improve the manuscript. We would also like to thank the field team at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland for providing invaluable support during the field campaign. Special thanks go to Sveinbjorn Steinthorsson and William Moreland for technical and logistical assistance in the field as well as to Sara Barsotti at the Icelandic Met Office for an interesting discussion on the topic. We would further like to thank Corrado Cimarelli, Werner Ertl-Ingrisch and Kai Uwe Hess for support in the laboratory and interesting discussions during the experimental campaign. We thank Diego Coppola and Marco Laiolo for their help with interpreting MIROVA data to understand the lava flow field dynamics. Stephan Kolzenburg and Daniele Giordano acknowledge the financial support for this research from an infrastructure development grant awarded through the Fondazione CRT (Giordano 2014) and further funding by the Compagnia di San Paulo, an ERASMUS Traineeship and a University of Torino local research project (Giordano 2012), for providing funding for this research. The presented research was partially funded by an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant (EVOKES – No. 247076) held by Prof. Donald Bruce Dingwell.
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Kolzenburg, S., Giordano, D., Thordarson, T. et al. The rheological evolution of the 2014/2015 eruption at Holuhraun, central Iceland. Bull Volcanol 79, 45 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00445-017-1128-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00445-017-1128-6