Seismic Velocity Changes at Mauna Loa Derived From Seismicity Prior to and During Its 2022 Eruption
Description:
Mauna Loa’s short-lived eruption from late November to early December 2022 marked the culmination of nearly a decade of elevated seismic activity and geodetic inflation. The volcano has been monitored by a network of permanent, primarily single-component short-period seismometers with open data since 2012. I used the continuous waveform data from that network to generate a catalog of seismicity using the open source “REDPy” Python package. This catalog enhances the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory’s public seismic catalog with additional detections and groups earthquakes by waveform similarity. Analysis of subtle differences in the recordings of the earthquakes in this catalog yields a history of changes in the shallow seismic velocity structure of the volcano. Seismic velocity changes are thought to be sensitive to changes in strain, and therefore might be expected during volcanic unrest and eruption. Indeed, initial results show a decrease in seismic velocity centered on the summit beginning in September 2022, corresponding to the onset of a vigorous precursory swarm of seismic activity and shallow inflation. During the eruption itself, I observe a complex spatiotemporal pattern, perhaps due in part to dike opening along the Northeast Rift Zone. Seismic velocity changes associated with non-volcanic sources such as large regional earthquakes and seasonal climate changes are also observed, investigated, and compared with supporting data. An open question in this work is whether the changes observed in September 2022 were unique to the pre-eruptive increase in unrest, which has direct implications for the use of this technique as a monitoring tool.
Session: Seismoacoustic, Geodetic and Other Geophysical Investigations of Active Volcanoes - I
Type: Oral
Date: 5/3/2024
Presentation Time: 08:30 AM (local time)
Presenting Author: Alicia
Student Presenter: No
Invited Presentation:
Authors
Alicia Hotovec-Ellis Presenting Author Corresponding Author ahotovec-ellis@usgs.gov U.S. Geological Survey |
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Seismic Velocity Changes at Mauna Loa Derived From Seismicity Prior to and During Its 2022 Eruption
Session
Seismoacoustic, Geodetic and Other Geophysical Investigations of Active Volcanoes