Near vent seismicity at the Tour Eiffel vent site, Lucky Strike hydrothermal field, Mid-Atlantic Ridge

Abstract

Intense discharge of high temperature fluids through focused vents at black smoker hydrothermal fields creates local entrainment of cold seawater into the shallow sub-seafloor. This secondary hydrothermal circulation generates lower temperature diffuse vents that surround the black smokers, carry a large part of the total hydrothermal heat flux, and facilitate mineral precipitation in the substratum. Pontbriand and Sohn (2014) constrained this secondary circulation beneath the Trans-Atlantic Geotraverse (TAG), by characterizing shallow microearthquakes which were located by a small ~200 m aperture short-period Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) network. These microearthquakes were proposed to have been triggered by reaction-driven cracking in response to anhydrite precipitation from heated seawater in the secondary circulation system. To detect possible shallow microearthquakes associated with the secondary circulation at the Tour Eiffel (TE) vent site, a small-scale ~150 m aperture 4 hydrophones network was deployed in 2016 as part of the EMSO-Azores observatory. TE is the largest vent site of the Lucky Strike hydrothermal field. It has a massive ~15 m high sulfide edifice, bearing several black smokers and surrounded by diffuse flow areas. The total heat flux, including both discrete and diffuse venting, from the TE vent site is estimated to be at least 20 MW, with more than 95% of the heat coming from diffuse venting. The first one year of data (September 2016 - September 2017) recorded by the hydrophone network includes shallow near vents events, whale songs and earthquakes originated outside the network. We therefore developed criteria based on waveform characteristics, number of phases, frequency spectra and synthetic waveform modelling to select only the shallow microearthquakes. We detected only 740 shallow microearthquakes, yielding a seismicity rate of only ~3 events/day and an average local magnitude of -2.48. The number of shallow events, and their magnitudes, are much smaller than those documented beneath the TAG hydrothermal mound (~ 243 events/day with average local magnitude = -0.95). The small number of shallow microearthquakes detected near TE over the one-year survey suggests that heating of entrained seawater and anhydrite precipitation are less prevalent than at TAG. This hypothesis is supported by time-series analysis of diffuse fluid samples, which mostly show no chemical evidence for anhydrite precipitation. It is also consistent with the TE vent site being smaller and having a lower estimated heat flux compared to the TAG mound (~1 GW).