Eruptive history of Mount Katmai, Alaska

Abstract

Mount Katmai has long been recognized for its caldera collapse during the great pyroclastic eruption of 1912 (which vented 10 km away at Novarupta in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes), but little has previously been reported about the geology of the remote ice-clad stratovolcano itself. Over several seasons, we reconnoitered all parts of the edifice and sampled most of the lava flows exposed on its flanks and caldera rim. The precipitous inner walls of the 1912 caldera remain too unstable for systematic sampling; so we provide instead a photographic and interpretive record of the wall sequences exposed. In contrast to the several andesite-dacite stratovolcanoes nearby, products of Mount Katmai range from basalt to rhyolite. Before collapse in 1912, there were two overlapping cones with separate vent complexes and craters; their products are here divided into eight sequences of lava flows, agglutinates, and phreatomagmatic ejecta. Latest Pleistocene and Holocene eruptive units include rhyodacite and rhyolite lava flows along the south rim; a major 22.8-ka rhyolitic plinian fall and ignimbrite deposit; a dacite-andesite zoned scoria fall; a thick sheet of dacite agglutinate that filled a paleocrater and draped the west side of the edifice; unglaciated leveed dacite lava flows on the southeast slope; and the Horseshoe Island dacite dome that extruded on the caldera floor after collapse. Pre-collapse volume of the glaciated Katmai edifice was ∼30 km3, and eruptive volume is estimated to have been 57 ± 13 km3. The latter figure includes ∼40 ± 6 km3 for the edifice, 5 ± 2 km3 for off-edifice dacite pyroclastic deposits, and 12 ± 5 km3 for the 22.8-ka rhyolitic pyroclastic deposits. To these can be added 13.5 km3 of magma that erupted at Novarupta in 1912, all or much of which is inferred to have been withdrawn from beneath Mount Katmai. The oldest part of the edifice exposed is a basaltic cone, which gave a 40Ar/39Ar plateau age of 89 ± 25 ka.