Collaborative Research: How faithfully are melt embayments wedded to magma ascent?

Explosive eruptions can cause wide-ranging societal impacts. The explosivity of a volcanic eruption is controlled in part by how fast magma rises in the conduit. Directly measuring magma ascent is challenging because it takes place underground and in a dangerous environment.

Small blebs of frozen magma trapped in crystals, called embayments, may preserve a record of ascent rate in the form of chemical diffusion gradients that scientists can apply as a kind of magma speedometer. This embayment technique has been increasingly used to understand the dynamics of ancient volcanic eruptions. As this speedometer technique grows in popularity, validating its accuracy is important.

Here, a series of laboratory experiments conducted using real magma at magmatic temperatures and pressures will recreate magma ascent under controlled conditions to test how well embayments record this process. Careful comparison between the controlled lab conditions and the diffusion gradients in the experimental embayments will clarify “if” and “how?” embayments faithfully record magmatic ascent.

Graduate and undergraduate students will be trained in research methods at CUNY and Baylor. In addition, public outreach will be performed at the National Museum of Natural History and the NY Virtual Volcano Observatory in the form of “Scientist-is-In” sessions and short-format educational videos on magma ascent.

Quantifying the rate of magma ascent in the volcanic conduit is critical to understanding the timing, magnitude, and behavior of eruptions. Quenched pockets of melt preserved within embayments are thought to preserve such rates as compositional gradients controlled by diffusive equilibration. Past studies using embayments to determine magma ascent rates have used a few, carefully selected samples and have made reasonable, but untested, assumptions involving diffusion and decompression pathway.

The key assumptions underlying embayment geospeedometry must be experimentally validated before it can be confidently used to advance the understanding of volcanic eruption dynamics. Here, the theoretical basis for embayment geospeedometry will be systematically tested against focused suites of natural samples and a series of decompression experiments using natural and synthetic embayments.

Important tests include (1) discovering how well a single embayment represents a batch of magma, and (2) whether observed diffusion profiles match those predicted from experimental conditions and key assumptions. If the experimental embayments are shown to be robust, then embayment geospeedometry will become a valuable tool for understanding the conditions in volcanic conduits during eruption.

If experimental diffusion profiles are instead shown to not match those predicted by experimental conditions then the experiments will provide an empirical framework for exploring the complexities recorded by embayments.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.