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  • Publication
    Tremor-rich shallow dyke formation followed by silent magma flow at Bárðarbunga in Iceland
    The Bárðarbunga eruption in Iceland in 2014 and 2015 produced about 1.6 km3 of lava. Magma propagated away from Bárðarbunga to a distance of 48 km in the subsurface beneath Vatnajökull glacier, emerging a few kilometres beyond the glacier's northern rim. A puzzling observation is the lack of shallow (<3 km deep), high-frequency earthquakes associated Q.1 with shallow dyke formation near the subaerial and subglacial eruptive sites, suggesting that near-surface dyke formation is seismically quiet. However, seismic array observations and seismic full wavefield simulations reveal the presence and nature of shallow, pre-eruptive, long-duration seismic tremor activity. Here we use analyses of seismic data to constrain therelationships between seismicity, tremor, dyke propagation and magma flow during the Bárðarbunga eruption. We show that although tremor is usually associated with magma flow in volcanic settings, pre-eruptive tremor at Bárðarbunga was probably caused by swarms of microseismic events during dyke formation, and hence is directly associated with fracturing of the upper 2-3 km of the crust. Subsequent magma flow in the newly formed shallow dyke was seismically silent, with almost a complete absence of seismicity or tremor. Hence, we suggest that the transition from temporarily isolated, large, deep earthquakes to many smaller, shallower, temporally overlapping earthquakes (< magnitude 2) that appear as continuous tremor announces the arrival of a dyke opening in the shallow crust, forming a pathway for silent magma flow to the Earth's surface. 
      778Scopus© Citations 37
  • Publication
    Persistent Shallow Background Microseismicity on Hekla Volcano, Iceland: A Potential Monitoring Tool
    Hekla is one of Iceland's most active volcanoes. Since 1970 it has erupted four times with a period of quiescence of 14 years since the last eruption. We detected persistent levels of background microseismicity with a temporary seismic network in autumn 2012. An amplitude based as well as an arrival-time based location method was applied to two populations of events and located them at shallow depths on the northern flank, close to the summit. This seismicity has not been identified previously by the permanent seismic network in Iceland as it is below its detection threshold. The detected events were either short, higher frequency events with distinct arrivals located beneath the summit on the northern flank of Hekla or longer, emergent, lower frequency events about 4 km northeast of the summit at 200¿400 m depth below the surface. Estimated moment magnitudes were MW = -1.1 to -0.1 and MW = -0.9 to -0.0 and local magnitudes ML = -0.5 to +0.3 and ML = -0.3 to +0.3, respectively. This seismicity does not show any correlation with gas output but is located at the steepest slopes of the edifice. Hence we suggest that the current shallow microseismicity at Hekla is structurally controlled. This offers a possible opportunity of using near summit microseismicity as a tool for monitoring emerging unrest at Hekla. Microseismicity rates will be very sensitive to small stress perturbations due to magma migration at depth. Currently in the absence of microseismicity monitoring, Hekla switches from apparently quiescent to fully eruptive on the order of only 1 h.
      413Scopus© Citations 6