Aso volcano, Japan: assessing the 100-year probability of a new caldera-forming eruption based on expert judgements with Bayes Net and Importance Sampling uncertainty analysis

Abstract

The Aso-4 explosive eruption on Kyushu, Japan, 89,500 years ago was one of the biggest eruptions in the last one hundred millennia, with a magnitude of approximately M8. Modern society requires the likelihood of natural events with potentially disastrous consequences to be evaluated, even if probabilities of occurrence are diminishingly small. For some situations, it is not satisfactory to assert an event scenario probability is “negligible” or can be “ignored”. Judicial hearings or litigation may require risk levels to be quantified, in which case, statements of scientific confidence could be decisive. Internationally, e.g., for nuclear site safety evaluations, event likelihoods on order of 10–7/year are often considered for quantitative assessment. At such hazard levels, this might include evaluating the proposition that a particular volcano can deliver a future super-eruption, a supposition that could be attached to Aso volcano. But, simplistically taking the average recurrence interval between past caldera-forming eruptions at a given volcano is an unreliable guide to the likelihood of a future repeat: each past event represented a unique set of tectonic and magmatic conditions within a continually evolving volcanic system. Such processes are not temporally stationary nor statistically uniform. To evaluate the probability of a new M8 event at Aso, within the next 100 years, we performed a comprehensive stochastic probability uncertainty analysis using a model implemented with advanced computational Bayes Net (BN) software. Our eruption process model is informed by multiple strands of evidence from volcanology, petrology, geochemistry and geophysics, together with estimates of epistemic (knowledge) uncertainty, adduced from reviews of published data, modelling and from expert judgement elicitation. Several lines of evidence characterise the likely structure, magmatic composition and eruptive state of the present-day Aso volcano, which has had numerous smaller eruptions since Aso-4. To calculate the probability of another M8 eruption of Aso, we implemented probabilistic ‘Importance Sampling’ in our model. With this approach, we find the chance of an Aso-4 scale eruption (characterised by mean volume 500 km3 DRE and approximate 90% credible interval [210 ‥ 1200] km3 DRE) is less than 1–in–1 billion in the next 100 years (i.e., < 10–9 probability). Based on current volcanological understanding and evidence, we believe this probability estimate is robust to within an order of magnitude.