Timescales of Dike Growth and Chamber Deflation Constrain Magma Storage and Transport Pathways During Kīlauea's 2018 Lower East Rift Zone Intrusion

Abstract

AbstractThe intrusion of magma into Kīlauea's lower East Rift Zone in May 2018 led to the largest eruption along this segment of the volcano in over 200 years. As magma drained from the rift zone, leading to the collapse of Pu'u ‘Ō‘ō, pressure at the summit initially remained elevated and dropped at a slower rate compared to historical intrusion events. The anomalously long timescale of summit deflation suggests that the dike was fed from multiple sources. Here we show that dikes can serve as “dipsticks” of magma reservoirs and that the co‐evolution of dike growth and reservoir deflation constrains key magma transport parameters. Using coupled dike‐chamber models constrained by ground deformation and seismicity, we test four configurations of magma plumbing in order to illuminate which reservoirs and transport pathways were activated during the intrusion phase (30 April to 3 May) of the 2018 event. Slow summit deflation relative to the rate of dike propagation is best explained by a model in which the dike initiates from a compressible magma reservoir in the East Rift Zone, which then drains magma upstream from the Halema'uma'u reservoir through a shallow transport system. We use a Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to estimate storage parameters for both reservoirs as well as the effective conductivity of the shallow magma transport system in the East Rift Zone, finding good agreement with independent estimates. Our results suggest that the rupture of reservoirs from within the East Rift Zone presents a unique hazard at Kīlauea.