Quantitative Assessment of Temporal Changes in Subaqueous Hydrothermal Activity in Active Crater Lakes During Unrest Based on a Time-Series of Lake Water Chemistry

Regular sampling of lake water has been performed at many volcanoes to assess the state of volcanic activity. However, it is not clear whether the absolute concentrations or, instead, rate of changes in concentrations are more suitable for such assessments. In this study, we show that temporal changes in concentrations of an element in lake water are described by a simple differential equation, assuming changes in lake volume and chemical processes are negligible. The time constants (63% response time for changes in the chemical concentration in lake water) have a wide range varying between 20 and 1,000 days for the studied volcanoes in Japan, meaning it takes a long time to assess volcanic activity based on the absolute concentration of an element. In order to assess the volcanic activity in a shorter time period, based on a time-series of lake element concentration data, we developed a numerical model to calculate temporal changes in the steady-state concentration, which is proportional to the elemental concentrations of the bulk hydrothermal fluid injected from subaqueous fumaroles and hot springs. We applied our method to Yugama crater lake at Kusatsu–Shirane volcano, Japan, and quantitatively evaluated temporal changes in the hydrothermal input from 1964 to 2020. As a result, we detected changes in the Cl concentrations of the bulk hydrothermal input that were associated with unrest including the phreatic eruption in 1976 and earthquake swarms in 1989–1992 and 2014–2020. The future concentration in the lake water can be predicted from the most recent steady-state concentrations. Comparing the predicted concentration curve with the concentration obtained from lake water samples, it is possible to quickly assess whether the concentration of the bulk hydrothermal input has increased/decreased or remained constant.

Time-Lapse Monitoring of Daily Velocity Changes in Binchuan, Southwestern China, Using Large-Volume Air-Gun Source Array Data

Temporal changes of seismic velocities in the Earth’s crust can be induced by stress perturbations or material damage from reasons such as strong ground motion, volcanic activities, and atmospheric effects. However, monitoring the temporal changes remains challenging, because most of them generally exist in small travel-time differences of seismic data. Here, we present an excellent case of daily variations of the subsurface structure detected using a large-volume air-gun source array of one-month experiment in Binchuan, Yunnan, southwestern China. The seismic data were recorded by 12 stations within ∼10 km away from the source and used to detect velocity change in the crust using the deconvolution method and sliding window cross-correlation method, which can eliminate the “intercept” error when cutting the air-gun signals and get the real subsurface variations. Furthermore, the multichannel singular spectral analysis method is used to separate the daily change (∼1 cycle per day) from the “long-period” change (<1 cycle per day) or noise. The result suggests that the daily velocity changes at the two nearest stations, 53277 (offset ∼700 m) and 53278 (offset ∼2.3 km), are well correlated with air temperature variation with a time lag of 5.0 ± 1.5 hr, which reflects that the velocity variations at the subsurface are likely attributed to thermoelastic strain. In contrast, both daily and long-period velocity changes at distant stations correlate better with the varying air pressure than the temperature, indicating that the velocity variations at deeper depth are dominated by the elastic loading of air pressure. Our results demonstrate that the air-gun source is a powerful tool to detect the velocity variation of the shallow crust media.

Hybrid Gravimetry to Map Water Storage Dynamics in a Mountain Catchment

In mountain areas, both the ecosystem and the local population highly depend on water availability. However, water storage dynamics in mountains is challenging to assess because it is highly variable both in time and space. This calls for innovative observation methods that can tackle such measurement challenge. Among them, gravimetry is particularly well-suited as it is directly sensitive–in the sense it does not require any petrophysical relationship–to temporal changes in water content occurring at surface or underground at an intermediate spatial scale (i.e., in a radius of 100 m). To provide constrains on water storage changes in a small headwater catchment (Strengbach catchment, France), we implemented a hybrid gravity approach combining in-situ precise continuous gravity monitoring using a superconducting gravimeter, with relative time-lapse gravity made with a portable Scintrex CG5 gravimeter over a network of 16 stations. This paper presents the resulting spatio-temporal changes in gravity and discusses them in terms of spatial heterogeneities of water storage. We interpret the spatio-temporal changes in gravity by means of: (i) a topography model which assumes spatially homogeneous water storage changes within the catchment, (ii) the topographic wetness index, and (iii) for the first time to our knowledge in a mountain context, by means of a physically based distributed hydrological model. This study therefore demonstrates the ability of hybrid gravimetry to assess the water storage dynamics in a mountain hydrosystem and shows that it provides observations not presumed by the applied physically based distributed hydrological model.