He Volcanological Institute of the Canary Islands (Involcan)entity dependent on the Tenerife Councilhas promoted new work on the temporal variability of explosive activity in the La Palma’s Tajogaite volcano during the 2021 eruptionbased on photography and terrestrial infrared videography, and which confirms that it had multiple mouths at shallow depth.
The study has been published in the prestigious international scientific journal ‘Frontiers in Earth Science’.
In this work promoted by Involcan and led by Janine Birnbaum, researcher at Columbia University (USA), researchers from Involcan, the Institute of Technology and Renewable Energies (ITER), and the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (Italy) have participated. ), collects a note from the Cabildo.
The Minister of Innovation, Research and Development, Juan José Martínez, points out that in recent years “Involcan has consolidated its experience in the application of thermography as a tool for volcanic monitoring.”
Thus, the eruption of the Tajogaite volcano in 2021 represented a “turning point” with the acquisition of new thermographic instrumentation and collaboration with top-level scientists and institutions in this field.
The study was based on taking thermographic images and videos using ground-based thermal photography and videography during the eruption of the Tajogaite volcano.
This allowed the evolution of explosive activity to be investigated on multiple time scales (seconds-minutes, hours and days-weeks).
The thermal images allowed us to observe a correlated activity between the multiple explosive mouths, which suggests that they must be connected in the subsurface at shallow depth, with a temporal variability controlled by the gas flow.
Likewise, this study suggests that the variability in the proportion of eruptive material ejected effusively or explosively depends on whether the magma is rich in gas.
This variation determines whether the eruption acquires a more explosive or more effusive character, depending on the degree of degassing of the magma.
This work has been possible thanks to the projects VOLRISKMAC (MAC/3.5b/124) and VOLRISKMAC II (MAC2/3.5b/328), co-financed by the international cooperation program of the European Commission INTERREG VA Spain-Portugal MAC 2014-2020 .
In addition to the Cumbre Vieja Emergency projects, financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain; TFassistance, financed by the Island Council of Tenerife and LPvolcano, financed by the Island Council of La Palma.
