Study a Relation Between the Lascar Volcano Microseimicity and Changes in the Local System of Lineaments, Obtained Using the Landsat 8 Images.

Abstract:

Over the last decades strong efforts have been made to apply new spaceborn technologies to the study of volcanic activity. Recent studies have shown that the high resolution satellite images can be very useful for tracking of evolution of the stress patterns related to the volcanic activity. It can be done by observing the changes in density and orientation of lineaments extracted from satellite images. A lineament is generally defined as a straight or a somewhat curved feature in the landscape visible in a satellite image as an aligned sequence of pixels of a contrasting intensity compared to the background. The system of lineaments extracted from the satellite images is not identical to the geological lineaments which are usually determined by land-based surveys, nevertheless, it generally reflects the structure of the faults and fractures in the Earth’s crust. For this study the lineaments were detected using the ADALGEO software, based on the Hough transform (Soto-Pinto et al, 2013). A temporal sequence of the Landsat 8 multispectral images of the Lascar volcano, located in the North of Chile, was used to study changes in lineament configuration during 2013-2014. It was found that, the number and orientation of lineaments is affected by microseimicity. In particular, it was found that often the density of lineaments decreases with the intensity of microseisms, which could be related to the volcano inflation.