Impulsive Seafloor Signals from the 2015 Eruption of Axial Seamount

Abstract:

Axial Seamount is a hotspot volcano on the Juan de Fuca Ridge that has erupted three times over the past two decades. The most recent eruption was recorded by a cabled seismic network in the southern half of the summit caldera that has been operated by the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) since November 2014. After five months of increasing seismicity, a 10-hour seismic crisis involving thousands of earthquakes began at 0500 GMT on April 24, 2015 accompanied by ~2 m of deflation in the central caldera (Nooner et al., this meeting). Local seismicity declined rapidly after the eruption, but thousands of impulsive waterborne events were observed across the network starting immediately after the seismic crisis. Over 1500 events per day were recorded on April 25 and 26, decreasing to less than 500 per day after May 1, and ceasing altogether around May 20. Each event comprises a train of three to five consistently spaced arrivals visible on all 3 seismometer channels with a broad frequency content of 10-100 Hz. The timing of arrivals across the network is consistent with water column multiples from a seafloor source to the north. A subset of events has been manually picked and located by modeling travel times of the first three arrivals assuming flat bathymetry at a range of depths between 1500-1800 m and a sound speed of 1.5 km/s. The preliminary locations are clustered around Axial Seamount’s northern rift at a distance of 10-15 km from the north rim of the caldera. In July, an OOI cruise discovered fresh pillow lavas up to 100 m thick and 670 m wide, and extending for 7 km along the rift in the same region (Kelley et al., this meeting). The source of the impulsive events is uncertain and could involve gas explosions, bubble collapse, and thermal or mechanical cracking, but their colocation with the fresh lava flow suggests that ocean bottom seismic networks can not only track the faulting and fracturing associated with subsurface magma movements but also the effusion of magma onto the seafloor.