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Abstract
AbstractIn September 2016, Piton de la Fournaise volcano, well known for its effusive and Hawaiian fountaining activity, produced, at the end of the eruption, an unusual phase of pulsating ash and bomb emission. Integration of geophysical data, with textural and petrological analysis of the samples, allowed us to constrain the main factors that controlled this sudden shift in activity, potentially dangerous for the tourist population that usually approach these “gentle” eruptive sites. Volcanic tremor, lava discharge rates, fountain heights, and SO2 emission changed rapidly during the eruption. Grain size and componentry of the tephra beds evolved from unimodal all along the sequence to bimodal on the last day of the activity, reflecting the contribution of both Hawaiian fountaining at the main vent (Vent A) and transient explosive activity at the second vent (Vent B). Hawaiian fountaining produced highly vesicular and almost microlite‐free tephra (golden pumice and fluidal scoria) while transient explosive activity emitted denser and crystal‐rich tephra (sideromelane and tachylite scoria) sometimes mingled with vesicular fragments. Permeability measurements on lapilli and bomb‐sized samples reveal that golden pumice and fluidal scoria were more gas‐permeable than the sideromelane and tachylite ones, while textural and chemical analyses of the ash support the hypothesis that these sideromelane and tachylite components were inherited from the subsurface crystallization of the initial golden pumice and fluidal scoria components. We thus suggest that Vent B accumulated a plug of degassed, cooled, and low‐permeable magma, which modulated overpressure pulses under the late input of ascending magma.
Highlights
Nowadays, active volcanoes are increasingly monitored and studied with a panel of multidisciplinary techniques
The September 2016 eruption is the seventh eruption at Piton de la Fournaise (PdF) since its reactivation in 2014, and the second of 2016
Because the eruption produced a large amount of ash compared to the other recent eruptive fissures at PdF (DynVolc 2017), we mostly focused on the ash particles to perform the glass composition measurements, petrology analysis and the micro-texture characterization
Summary
Active volcanoes are increasingly monitored and studied with a panel of multidisciplinary techniques. The presence of debris within the superficial conduits (Patrick et al 2007), the abundance of recycled materials (D’Oriano et al 2014), or the presence of external fluids within the magmatic systems (Dellino et al 2012) are invoked for the origin of ash emissions Following these approaches we focused on the main factors that control the shift in activity from Hawaiian fountaining events to transient bomb and ash explosions during the September 2016 eruption at Piton de la Fournaise (PdF) volcano (La Réunion Island, France)
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