Progressive approach to eruption at Campi Flegrei caldera in southern Italy

Stefano Carlino,Giuseppe De Natale,Christopher R.J Kilburn

doi:10.1038/ncomms15312

Stefano Carlino, Giuseppe De Natale + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15312

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Abstract

Unrest at large calderas rarely ends in eruption, encouraging vulnerable communities to perceive emergency warnings of volcanic activity as false alarms. A classic example is the Campi Flegrei caldera in southern Italy, where three episodes of major uplift since 1950 have raised its central district by about 3 m without an eruption. Individual episodes have conventionally been treated as independent events, so that only data from an ongoing episode are considered pertinent to evaluating eruptive potential. An implicit assumption is that the crust relaxes accumulated stress after each episode. Here we apply a new model of elastic-brittle failure to test the alternative view that successive episodes promote a long-term accumulation of stress in the crust. The results provide the first quantitative evidence that Campi Flegrei is evolving towards conditions more favourable to eruption and identify field tests for predictions on how the caldera will behave during future unrest.

Highlights

Unrest at large calderas rarely ends in eruption, encouraging vulnerable communities to perceive emergency warnings of volcanic activity as false alarms
Large calderas with areas of 100 km[2] or more are among the most-populated active volcanoes on Earth
They commonly show episodes of unrest at intervals of B10–102 years[1] and, the minority end in eruption, each raises concern that volcanic activity might be imminent

Summary

Introduction

Unrest at large calderas rarely ends in eruption, encouraging vulnerable communities to perceive emergency warnings of volcanic activity as false alarms. Large calderas with areas of 100 km[2] or more are among the most-populated active volcanoes on Earth They commonly show episodes of unrest at intervals of B10–102 years[1] and, the minority end in eruption, each raises concern that volcanic activity might be imminent. With an unprecedented 2,000-year record of historical unrest and eruption[2], Campi Flegrei provides key insights for understanding the dynamic evolution of large calderas. The largest ground movements recorded since Roman times have been concentrated near the modern coastal town of Pozzuoli at the centre of the caldera (Fig. 1). They have been dominated by a secular subsidence of c. The crust contains a distributed population of faults that are much smaller than the dimensions over which deformation has occurred

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