Large landslides triggered by caldera collapse events in Tenerife, Canary Islands

Abstract

Landsliding is a significant process on volcanic edifices, with individual events exceeding several cubic kilometres in volume. The causes of such mass movements and their relationship with volcanic activity are still poorly understood. Landslide events are an important factor in the evolution of volcanic islands such as Tenerife, where vertical and lateral collapses have occurred repeatedly. Subaerial and submarine processes related to landslide events strongly influence the morphology of the island. On Tenerife there are three very big valleys, Güimar, La Orotava and Icod, that have been created by large landslide events with ages ranging from Upper Pliocene to Middle Pleistocene. The landslides affect the northern flanks of the island and the slopes of a large central volcanic edifice, the Las Canadas volcano, which is truncated by the Las Canadas caldera, a multicyclic collapse depression, formed between 1.02 and 0.17 Ma. We have focused our studies on the potential for caldera collapse events to trigger large scale landslides. The available geological and morphological information has been incorporated into numerical models, which simulate the destabilising effects of a caldera collapse episode. The results of the numerical modelling indicate that processes associated with caldera collapse events can overcome the stabilising forces on the volcano flank and trigger landslides. We propose that caldera collapse events may have triggered large landslides on the slopes of the Las Canadas volcano.