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Hot stuff: Magma at shallow depth under Hawaii

Ohio State University researchers have found a new way to gauge the depth of the magma chamber that forms the Hawaiian Island volcanic chain, and determined that the magma lies much closer to the surface than previously thought.
The finding could help scientists predict when Hawaiian volcanoes are going to erupt. It also suggests that Hawaii holds great potential for thermal energy.
Julie Ditkof, an honors undergraduate student in earth sciences at Ohio State, described the study at the American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco on Tuesday, December 14.
For her honors thesis, Ditkof took a technique that her advisor Michael Barton, professor of earth sciences, developed to study magma in Iceland, and applied it to Hawaii.
She discovered that magma lies an average of 3 to 4 kilometers (about 1.9 to 2.5 miles) beneath the surface of Hawaii.

“Hawaii was already unique among volcanic systems, because it has such an extensive plumbing system, and the magma that erupts has a unique and variable chemical composition,” Ditkof explained. “Now we know the chamber is at a shallow depth not seen anywhere else in the world.”

For example, Barton determined that magma chambers beneath Iceland lie at an average depth of 20 kilometers.
While that means the crust beneath Hawaii is much thinner than the crust beneath Iceland, Hawaiians have nothing to fear.
“The crust in Hawaii has been solidifying from eruptions for more than 300,000 years now. The crust doesn’t get consumed by the magma chamber. It floats on top,” Ditkof explained.
The results could help settle two scientific debates, however.
Researchers have wondered whether more than one magma chamber was responsible for the varying chemical compositions, even though seismological studies indicated only one chamber was present.
Meanwhile, those same seismological studies pegged the depth as shallow, while petrologic studies – studies of rock composition – pegged it deeper.
There has never been a way to prove who was right, until now.
“We suspected that the depth was actually shallow, but we wanted to confirm or deny all those other studies with hard data,” Barton said.
He and Ditkof determined that there is one large magma chamber just beneath the entire island chain that feeds the Hawaiian volcanoes through many different conduits.
They came to this conclusion after Ditkof analyzed the chemical composition of nearly 1,000 magma samples. From the ratio of some elements to others – aluminum to calcium, for example, or calcium to magnesium – she was able to calculate the pressure at which the magma had crystallized.
For his studies of Iceland, Barton created a methodology for converting those pressure calculations to depth. When Ditkof applied that methodology, she obtained an average depth of 3 to 4 kilometers.
Researchers could use this technique to regularly monitor pressures inside the chamber and make more precise estimates of when eruptions are going to occur.
Barton said that, ultimately, the finding might be more important in terms of energy.
“Hawaii has huge geothermal resources that haven’t been tapped fully,” he said, and quickly added that scientists would have to determine whether tapping that energy was practical – or safe.
“You’d have to drill some test bore holes. That’s dangerous on an active volcano, because then the lava could flow down and wipe out your drilling rig.”
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the Ohio State University

Ancient raindrops reveal a wave of mountains sent south by sinking Farallon plate

50 million years ago, mountains began popping up in southern British Columbia. Over the next 22 million years, a wave of mountain building swept (geologically speaking) down western North America as far south as Mexico and as far east as Nebraska, according to Stanford geochemists. Their findings help put to rest the idea that the mountains mostly developed from a vast, Tibet-like plateau that rose up across most of the western U.S. roughly simultaneously and then subsequently collapsed and eroded into what we see today.
The data providing the insight into the mountains – so popularly renowned for durability – came from one of the most ephemeral of sources: raindrops. Or more specifically, the isotopic residue – fingerprints, effectively – of ancient precipitation that rained down upon the American west between 65 and 28 million years ago.
Atoms of the same element but with different numbers of neutrons in their nucleus are called isotopes. More neutrons make for a heavier atom and as a cloud rises, the water molecules that contain the heavier isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen tend to fall first. By measuring the ratio of heavy to light isotopes in the long-ago rainwater, researchers can infer the elevation of the land when the raindrops fell.
 
The water becomes incorporated into clays and carbonate minerals on the surface, or in volcanic glass, which are then preserved for the ages in the sediments.
 
Hari Mix, a PhD candidate in Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford, worked with the analyses of about 2,800 samples – several hundred that he and his colleagues collected, the rest from published studies – and used the isotopic ratios to calculate the composition of the ancient rain. Most of the samples were from carbonate deposits in ancient soils and lake sediments, taken from dozens of basins around the western U.S.
 
Using the elevation trends revealed in the data, Mix was able to decipher the history of the mountains. “Where we got a huge jump in isotopic ratios, we interpret that as a big uplift,” he said.

“We saw a major isotopic shift at around 49 million years ago, in southwest Montana,” he said. “And another one at 39 mya, in northern Nevada” as the uplift moved southward. Previous work by Chamberlain’s group had found evidence for these shifts in data from two basins, but Mix’s work with the larger data set demonstrated that the pattern of uplift held across the entire western U.S.
 
The uplift is generally agreed to have begun when the Farallon plate, a tectonic plate that was being shoved under the North American plate, slowly began peeling away from the underside of the continent.

“The peeling plate looked sort of like a tongue curling down,” said Page Chamberlain, a professor in environmental Earth system science who is Mix’s advisor.
 
As hot material from the underlying mantle flowed into the gap between the peeling plates, the heat and buoyancy of the material caused the overlying land to rise in elevation. The peeling tongue continued to fall off, and hot mantle continued to flow in behind it, sending a slow-motion wave of mountain-building coursing southward.
“We knew that the Farallon plate fell away, but the geometry of how that happened and the topographic response to it is what has been debated,” Mix said.
 
Mix and Chamberlain estimate that the topographic wave would have been at least one to two kilometers higher than the landscape it rolled across and would have produced mountains with elevations up to a little over 4 kilometers (about 14,000 feet), comparable to the elevations existing today.
 
Mix said their isotopic data corresponds well with other types of evidence that have been documented.

“There was a big north to south sweep of volcanism through the western U.S. at the exact same time,” he said.
There was also a simultaneous extension of the Earth’s crust, which results when the crust is heated from below, as it would have been by the flow of hot magma under the North American plate.

“The pattern of topographic uplift we found matches what has been documented by other people in terms of the volcanology and extension,” Mix said.

“Those three things together, those patterns, all point to something going on with the Farallon plate as being responsible for the construction of the western mountain ranges, the Cordillera.”
Chamberlain said that while there was certainly elevated ground, it was not like Tibet.
“It was not an average elevation of 15,000 feet. It was something much more subdued,” he said.

“The main implication of this work is that it was not a plateau that collapsed, but rather something that happened in the mantle, that was causing this mountain growth,” Chamberlain said.
 
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the Stanford University

First measurement of magnetic field in Earth’s core

A University of California, Berkeley, geophysicist has made the first-ever measurement of the strength of the magnetic field inside Earth’s core, 1,800 miles underground

The magnetic field strength is 25 Gauss, or 50 times stronger than the magnetic field at the surface that makes compass needles align north-south. Though this number is in the middle of the range geophysicists predict, it puts constraints on the identity of the heat sources in the core that keep the internal dynamo running to maintain this magnetic field


“This is the first really good number we’ve had based on observations, not inference,” said author Bruce A. Buffett, professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley. “The result is not controversial, but it does rule out a very weak magnetic field and argues against a very strong field.”

The results are published in the Dec. 16 issue of the journal Nature.
 
A strong magnetic field inside the outer core means there is a lot of convection and thus a lot of heat being produced, which scientists would need to account for, Buffett said. The presumed sources of energy are the residual heat from 4 billion years ago when the planet was hot and molten, release of gravitational energy as heavy elements sink to the bottom of the liquid core, and radioactive decay of long-lived elements such as potassium, uranium and thorium.
 
A weak field – 5 Gauss, for example – would imply that little heat is being supplied by radioactive decay, while a strong field, on the order of 100 Gauss, would imply a large contribution from radioactive decay.

“A measurement of the magnetic field tells us what the energy requirements are and what the sources of heat are,” Buffett said.
 
About 60 percent of the power generated inside the earth likely comes from the exclusion of light elements from the solid inner core as it freezes and grows, he said. This constantly builds up crud in the outer core.
 
The Earth’s magnetic field is produced in the outer two-thirds of the planet’s iron/nickel core. This outer core, about 1,400 miles thick, is liquid, while the inner core is a frozen iron and nickel wrecking ball with a radius of about 800 miles – roughly the size of the moon. The core is surrounded by a hot, gooey mantle and a rigid surface crust.
 
The cooling Earth originally captured its magnetic field from the planetary disk in which the solar system formed. That field would have disappeared within 10,000 years if not for the planet’s internal dynamo, which regenerates the field thanks to heat produced inside the planet. The heat makes the liquid outer core boil, or “convect,” and as the conducting metals rise and then sink through the existing magnetic field, they create electrical currents that maintain the magnetic field. This roiling dynamo produces a slowly shifting magnetic field at the surface.

“You get changes in the surface magnetic field that look a lot like gyres and flows in the oceans and the atmosphere, but these are being driven by fluid flow in the outer core,” Buffett said.
 
Buffett is a theoretician who uses observations to improve computer models of the earth’s internal dynamo. Now at work on a second generation model, he admits that a lack of information about conditions in the earth’s interior has been a big hindrance to making accurate models.
 
 
He realized, however, that the tug of the moon on the tilt of the earth’s spin axis could provide information about the magnetic field inside. This tug would make the inner core precess – that is, make the spin axis slowly rotate in the opposite direction – which would produce magnetic changes in the outer core that damp the precession. Radio observations of distant quasars – extremely bright, active galaxies – provide very precise measurements of the changes in the earth’s rotation axis needed to calculate this damping.

“The moon is continually forcing the rotation axis of the core to precess, and we’re looking at the response of the fluid outer core to the precession of the inner core,” he said.
 
By calculating the effect of the moon on the spinning inner core, Buffett discovered that the precession makes the slightly out-of-round inner core generate shear waves in the liquid outer core. These waves of molten iron and nickel move within a tight cone only 30 to 40 meters thick, interacting with the magnetic field to produce an electric current that heats the liquid. This serves to damp the precession of the rotation axis. The damping causes the precession to lag behind the moon as it orbits the earth. A measurement of the lag allowed Buffett to calculate the magnitude of the damping and thus of the magnetic field inside the outer core.
 
Buffett noted that the calculated field – 25 Gauss – is an average over the entire outer core. The field is expected to vary with position.
“I still find it remarkable that we can look to distant quasars to get insights into the deep interior of our planet,” Buffett said.
 
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of California – Berkeley

New way found of monitoring volcanic ash cloud

The eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull in April this year resulted in a giant ash cloud, which – at one point covering most of Europe – brought international aviation to a temporary standstill, resulting in travel chaos for tens of thousands
New research, to be published today, Friday 10 December, in IOP Publishing’s Environmental Research Letters, shows that lightning could be used as part of an integrated approach to estimate volcanic plume properties.
The scientists found that during many of the periods of significant volcanic activity, the ash plume was sufficiently electrified to generate lightning, which was measured by the UK Met Office’s long range lightning location network (ATDnet), operating in the Very Low Frequency radio spectrum.
The measurements suggest a general correlation between lightning frequency and plume height and the method has the advantage of being detectable many thousands of kilometers away, in both day and night as well as in all weather conditions.

As the researchers write, “When a plume becomes sufficiently electrified to produce lightning, the rate of lightning generation provides a method of remotely monitoring the plume height, offering clear benefits to the volcanic monitoring community.”
 
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the Institute of Physics

Using chaos to model geophysical phenomena

Geophysical phenomena such as the dynamics of the atmosphere and ocean circulation are typically modeled mathematically by tracking the motion of air or water particles. These mathematical models define velocity fields that, given (i) a position in three-dimensional space and (ii) a time instant, provide a speed and direction for a particle at that position and time instant
“Geophysical phenomena are still not fully understood, especially in turbulent regimes,” explains Gary Froyland at the School of Mathematics and Statistics and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems (MASCOS) at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

“Nevertheless, it is very important that scientists can quantify the ‘transport’ properties of these geophysical systems: Put very simply, how does a packet of air or water get from A to B, and how large are these packets? An example of one of these packets is the Antarctic polar vortex, a rotating mass of air in the stratosphere above Antarctica that traps chemicals such as ozone and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), exacerbating the effect of the CFCs on the ozone hole,” Froyland says.

 
In the American Institute of Physics’ journal CHAOS, Froyland and his research team, including colleague Adam Monahan from the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria in Canada, describe how they developed the first direct approach for identifying these packets, called “coherent sets” due to their nondispersive properties.
This technique is based on so-called “transfer operators,” which represent a complete description of the ensemble evolution of the fluid. The transfer operator approach is very simple to implement, they say, requiring only singular vector computations of a matrix of transitions induced by the dynamics.
 
When tested using European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) data, they found that their new methodology was significantly better than existing technologies for identifying the location and transport properties of the vortex.
 
The transport operator methodology has myriad applications in atmospheric science and physical oceanography to discover the main transport pathways in the atmosphere and oceans, and to quantify the transport. “As atmosphere-ocean models continue to increase in resolution with improved computing power, the analysis and understanding of these models with techniques such as transfer operators must be undertaken beyond pure simulation,” says Froyland.
 
Their next application will be the Agulhas rings off the South African coast, because the rings are responsible for a significant amount of transport of warm water and salt between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.
 
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the American Institute of Physics

New research shows rivers cut deep notches in the Alps’ broad glacial valleys

For years, geologists have argued about the processes that formed steep inner gorges in the broad glacial valleys of the Swiss Alps.
 
The U-shaped valleys were created by slow-moving glaciers that behaved something like road graders, eroding the bedrock over hundreds or thousands of years. When the glaciers receded, rivers carved V-shaped notches, or inner gorges, into the floors of the glacial valleys. But scientists disagreed about whether those notches were erased by subsequent glaciers and then formed all over again as the second round of glaciers receded.
New research led by a University of Washington scientist indicates that the notches endure, at least in part, from one glacial episode to the next. The glaciers appear to fill the gorges with ice and rock, protecting them from being scoured away as the glaciers move.
When the glaciers receded, the resulting rivers returned to the gorges and easily cleared out the debris deposited there, said David Montgomery, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences.

“The alpine inner gorges appear to lay low and endure glacial attack. They are topographic survivors,” Montgomery said.

“The answer is not so simple that the glaciers always win. The river valleys can hide under the glaciers and when the glaciers melt the rivers can go back to work.”
 
Montgomery is lead author of a paper describing the research, published online Dec. 5 in Nature Geoscience. Co-author is Oliver Korup of the University of Potsdam in Germany, who did the work while with the Swiss Federal Research Institutes in Davos, Switzerland.
 
The researchers used topographic data taken from laser-based (LIDAR) measurements to determine that, if the gorges were erased with each glacial episode, the rivers would have had to erode the bedrock from one-third to three-quarters of an inch per year since the last glacial period to get gorges as deep as they are today.
“That is screamingly fast. It’s really too fast for the processes,” Montgomery said. Such erosion rates would exceed those in all areas of the world except the most tectonically active regions, the researchers said, and they would have to maintain those rates for 1,000 years.
 
Montgomery and Korup found other telltale evidence, sediment from much higher elevations and older than the last glacial deposits, at the bottom of the river gorges. That material likely was pushed into the gorges as glaciers moved down the valleys, indicating the gorges formed before the last glaciers.

“That means the glaciers aren’t cutting down the bedrock as fast as the rivers do. If the glaciers were keeping up, each time they’d be able to erase the notch left by the river,” Montgomery said.
 
“They’re locked in this dance, working together to tear the mountains down.”
The work raises questions about how common the preservation of gorges might be in other mountainous regions of the world.

“It shows that inner gorges can persist, and so the question is, ‘How typical is that?’ I don’t think every inner gorge in the world survives multiple glaciations like that, but the Swiss Alps are a classic case. That’s where mountain glaciation was first discovered.”
 
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Washington

SCEC’s ‘M8’ earthquake simulation breaks computational records, promises better quake models

A multi-disciplinary team of researchers has presented the world’s most advanced earthquake shaking simulation at the Supercomputing 2010 (SC10) conference held this week in New Orleans. The research was selected as a finalist for the Gordon Bell prize, awarded at the annual conference for outstanding achievement in high-performance computing applications.

The “M8” simulation represents how a magnitude 8.0 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault will shake a larger area, in greater detail, than previously possible. Perhaps most importantly, the development of the M8 simulation advances the state-of-the-art in terms of the speed and efficiency at which such calculations can be performed.

The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) at the University of Southern California (USC) was the lead coordinator in the project. San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) researchers provided the high-performance computing and scientific visualization expertise for the simulation. Scientific details of the earthquake were developed by scientists at San Diego State University (SDSU). Ohio State University (OSU) researchers were also part of the collaborative effort to improve the efficiency of the software involved.
While this specific earthquake has a low probability of occurrence, the improvements in technology required to produce this simulation will now allow scientists to simulate other more likely earthquakes scenarios in much less time than previously required. Because such simulations are the most important and widespread applications of high performance computing for seismic hazard estimation currently in use, the SCEC team has been focused on optimizing the technologies and codes needed to create them.
The M8 simulation was funded through a number of National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and it was performed using supercomputer resources including NSF’s Kraken supercomputer at National Institute for Computational Science (NICS) and the Department of Energy (DOE) Jaguar supercomputer at the National Center for Computational Science . The SCEC M8 simulation represents the latest in earthquake science and in computations at the petascale level, which refers to supercomputers capable of more than one quadrillion floating point operations (calculations) per second.
“
Petascale simulations such as this one are needed to understand the rupture and wave dynamics of the largest earthquakes, at shaking frequencies required to engineer safe structures,” said Thomas Jordan, director of SCEC and Principal Investigator for the project. Previous simulations were useful only for modeling how tall structures will behave in earthquakes, but the new simulation can be used to understand how a broader range of buildings will respond.
“The scientific results of this massive simulation are very interesting, and its level of detail has allowed us to observe things that we were not able to see in the past,” said Kim Olsen, professor of geological sciences at SDSU, and lead seismologist of the study. .
However, given the massive number of calculations required, only the most advanced supercomputers are capable of producing such simulations in a reasonable time period. “This M8 simulation represents a milestone calculation, a breakthrough in seismology both in terms of computational size and scalability,” said Yifeng Cui, a computational scientist at SDSC. “It’s also the largest and most detailed simulation of a major earthquake ever performed in terms of floating point operations, and opens up new territory for earthquake science and engineering with the goal of reducing the potential for loss of life and property.”
Specifically, the M8 simulation is the largest in terms duration of the shaking modeled (six minutes) and the geographical area covered – a rectangular volume approximately 500 miles (810km) long by 250 miles (405 km) wide, by 50 miles (85km) deep. The team’s latest research also set a new record in the number of computer processor cores used, with 223,074 cores sustaining performance of 220 trillion calculations per second for 24 hours on the Jaguar Cray XT5 supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee.
“
We have come a long way in just six years, doubling the seismic frequencies modeled by our simulations every two to three years, from 0.5 Hertz (or cycles per second) in the TeraShake simulations, to 1.0 Hertz in the ShakeOut simulations, and now to 2.0 Hertz in this latest project,” said Phil Maechling, SCEC’s associate director for Information Technology.
In terms of earthquake science, these simulations can be used to study issues of how earthquake waves travel through structures in the earth’s crust and to improve three-dimensional models of such structures.
“
Based on our calculations, we are finding that deep sedimentary basins, such as those in the Los Angeles area, are getting larger shaking than are predicted by the standard methods,” Jordan said. “By improving the predictions, making them more realistic, we can help engineers make new buildings safer.” The simulations are also useful in developing better seismic hazard policies and for improving scenarios used in emergency planning.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Southern California

Scientists look deeper for coal ash hazards

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency weighs whether to define coal ash as hazardous waste, a Duke University study identifies new monitoring protocols and insights that can help investigators more accurately measure and predict the ecological impacts of coal ash contaminants.

“The take-away lesson is we need to change how and where we look for coal ash contaminants,” says Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “Risks to water quality and aquatic life don’t end with surface water contamination, but much of our current monitoring does.”

The study, published online this week in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology, documents contaminant levels in aquatic ecosystems over an 18-month period following a massive coal sludge spill in 2008 at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tenn.

By analyzing more than 220 water samples collected over the 18-month period, the Duke team found that high concentrations of arsenic from the TVA coal ash remained in pore water — water trapped within river-bottom sediment — long after contaminant levels in surface waters dropped back below safe thresholds.
Samples extracted from 10 centimeters to half a meter below the surface of sediment in downstream rivers contained arsenic levels of up to 2,000 parts per billion – well above the EPA’s thresholds of 10 parts per billion for safe drinking water, and 150 parts per billion for
protection of aquatic life “It’s like cleaning your house,” Vengosh says of the finding. “Everything may look clean, but if you look under the rugs, that’s where you find the dirt.”

The potential impacts of pore water contamination extend far beyond the river bottom, he explains, because “this is where the biological food chain begins, so any bioaccumulation of toxins will start here.”

The research team, which included two graduate students from Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Pratt School of Engineering, also found that acidity and the loss or gain of oxygen in water play key roles in controlling how arsenic, selenium and other coal ash contaminants leach into the environment. Knowing this will help scientists better predict the fate and migration of contaminants derived from coal ash residues, particularly those stored in holding ponds and landfills, as well as any potential leakage into lakes, rivers and other aquatic systems.

The study comes as the EPA is considering whether to define ash from coal-burning power plants as hazardous waste. The deadline for public comment to the EPA was Nov. 19; a final ruling — what Vengosh calls “a defining moment” — is expected in coming months.

“At more than 3.7 million cubic meters, the scope of the TVA spill is unprecedented, but similar processes are taking place in holding ponds, landfills and other coal ash storage facilities across the nation,” he says. “As long as coal ash isn’t regulated as hazardous waste, there is no way to prevent discharges of contaminants from these facilities and protect the environment.”

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the Duke University
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