Published February 3, 2023 | public
Journal Article

The magmatic web beneath Hawai'i

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Abstract

The deep magmatic architecture of the Hawaiian volcanic system is central to understanding the transport of magma from the upper mantle to the individual volcanoes. We leverage advances in earthquake monitoring with deep learning algorithms to image the structures underlying a major mantle earthquake swarm of nearly 200,000 events that rapidly accelerated after the 2018 Kīlauea caldera collapse. At depths of 36 to 43 kilometers, we resolve a 15-kilometers-long collection of near-horizontal sheeted structures that we identify as a sill complex. These sills connect to the lower depths of Kīlauea's plumbing by a 25-kilometers-long belt of seismicity. Additionally, a column of seismicity links the sill complex to a shallow décollement near Mauna Loa. These findings implicate the mantle sill complex as a nexus for magma transport beneath Hawai'i and furthermore indicate widespread magmatic connectivity in the volcanic system.

Additional Information

The authors acknowledge comments by A. Flinders and an anonymous reviewer that substantially improved the manuscript. The facilities of IRIS Data Services, and specifically the IRIS Data Management Center (DMC), were used for access to waveforms, related metadata, and/or derived products used in this study. IRIS Data Services are funded through the Seismological Facilities for the Advancement of Geoscience (SAGE) Award of the National Science Foundation under cooperative support agreement EAR-1851048. The computations presented in this work were conducted in the Resnick High Performance Computing Center, a facility supported by the Resnick Sustainability Institute at the California Institute of Technology. Z.E.R. and J.D.W. received support from NSF award EAR-2034167. J.M.J. acknowledges the JPL Strategic Research & Technology Development Program, "Venus Science Into The Next Decade." Author contributions: W.Z. performed phase picking. Z.E.R. and J.D.W. performed quality control on the phase picks and constructed the catalog. Z.E.R. and W.Z. performed earthquake relocation. J.D.W. performed the frequency index calculations. J.D.W., W.Z., Z.E.R., and J.M.J. contributed to data analysis and writing. All authors contributed to the revised version of the manuscript. Data and materials availability: Seismic data are publicly available from the IRIS DMC. The seismicity catalog developed in this study will be made publicly available. All authors declare no competing interests.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023