Bizarre crystals reveal underground magma 'highway'

The deadly 1963-1965 eruption of Iraz? contained lava that pushed through the earth's 20-mile thick crust in about a year, reveal crystals from deep below the Earth's surface. Conventional wisdom says magma needs hundreds or thousands of years to make the trip.

By Liz Fuller-Wright,?Correspondent / August 1, 2013

A lake occupies one of the summit craters of Iraz?, one of Costa Rica's most active volcanoes. Iraz? rises to 11260 feet (3432 m) near the capital city of San Jos? and is the country's highest volcano. This crater lake, seen in 1996 from the southern crater rim, has been the source of many historical eruptions.

Jos? Enrique Valverde Sanabria / Eduardo Malavassi / OVSICORI-UNA

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Not all volcanoes are created equal. Sometimes magma screams upward ? in the kimberlite tubes that bring diamonds to the surface, magma flies upward at over 800 miles per hour ? but that's very unusual, and limited to small volcanoes. Most magma, especially in big volcanoes, is slow and steady ? more tortoise than hare. Right?

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Not necessarily, says Philipp Ruprecht, a volcanologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. "We like to call it the highway from hell," said his co-author Terry Plank, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty, in a press release.

In an article published in today's Nature, Drs. Ruprecht and Plank describe fast-moving magmas not just in tiny volcanoes or kimberlite tubes, where it might be expected, but in a huge, long-lived volcano in Costa Rica.

"That's the interesting story, really, that such a fast transport mechanism exists even in these long-lasting, large stratovolcanic systems that are thought to operate on much longer time scales," says Ruprecht.

They examined Iraz?, a massive volcano in Costa Rica. Reaching over 11,000 feet tall and spreading across 200 square miles, Iraz? is the tallest volcano in Costa Rica, and one of the most active. It has erupted two dozen times in the past 300 years, most famously emerging from a 23-year dormant period to shower ash over President John F. Kennedy's visit to Costa Rica in March 1963.

"Typically, magma moves upward, usually by cracking the rocks above it and creating a space for the magma to go into," explains Ruprecht, "taking steady steps toward the magma chamber. In this study, it was a much more rapid ascent."

In other words, sometimes it skips the long trip up the stairs in favor of the express elevator to the penthouse.

This could have important implications for volcano prediction, which is still more art than science. If magma is rising through the crust less than a year before the eruption, that means that tracking the movement could help scientists warn of an imminent eruption.

Unfortunately, the earthquakes caused by magma tend to be very small, only magnitude 1 or 2, and very, very deep ? miles below the surface. The global earthquake system is better at catching big, shallow earthquakes, around magnitude 3 or higher, says Ruprecht. It's a princess-and-the-pea problem: tiny, deep earthquakes can only be felt by very, very sensitive equipment located on the flanks of the volcano itself.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/Uo2_t6CW6lE/Bizarre-crystals-reveal-underground-magma-highway

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