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CITATION: Huber, C., and Toramaru, A., 2024, Increase in magma supply to Sakurajima volcano’s (Japan) shallow magma chamber over the past 500 years:
Geology, v. 52, p. 235–239, https://doi.org/10.1130/G51763.1
Figure 1. Outputs of
Markov chain Monte
Carlo (MCMC) inversions
for nine Markov chains
(90,000 forward models).
Plots on the diagonal
show marginal posterior
distributions for param-
eters A, B, and c (see text
for parameter descrip-
tions); off-diagonal plots
show covariance (warm
colors represent more
likely solutions, here like-
lihood normalized).
DISCUSSION vastly increase the compressibility of the magma short time span, recharge provides only a rela-
At Sakurajima, the shortening of the repose (Townsend et al., 2019). As a result, subsequent tively small contribution to the overall mass and
time from the Bunmei to Taisho eruptions sug- eruptions (An-ei and Taisho), which start satu- heat balance and therefore does not dramatically
gests a net increase in magma recharge rate rated with volatiles according to our model, are alter the CSDs. Interestingly, CSDs of the more
with time, but the short time span studied (500 significantly more voluminous than Bunmei mafic and high-temperature plagioclase pheno-
years) is insufficient to attribute the larger because bubble expansion and exsolution dur- crysts originating from the recharging magmas
eruption volumes to a significant growth of ing the eruption buffer the pressure drop caused systematically increase the slope and intercept
the magma chamber. The volume of eruptions by magma withdrawal. of log-linear CSDs (i.e., log population density
depends mostly on the volume of magma avail- Pumice textures from the Bunmei and vs. linear crystal size) with time, consistent with
able (chamber volume), the compressibility of Taisho eruptions seem to support an increase the geologically inferred recharge rate increase
the magma, and the overpressure at the onset of in magma compressibility between the Bunmei, between the Bunmei and Showa eruptions
eruptions (Huppert and Woods, 2002; Townsend An-ei, and Taisho eruptions. Bunmei pumices (Yamashita and Toramaru, 2020).
et al., 2019): show few phenobubbles (<10 vol%), and most The model results, supported by textural
of the porosity is composed of matrix bubbles analyses, suggest that volatile exsolution dur-
Ver = V β ∆ Pc , (2) nucleated during magma ascent to the surface ing or shortly after the Bunmei eruption is key
(Toramaru, 2022). Taisho pumices are signif- to explaining the increase in eruption volume
where Ver and V are respectively the erupted and icantly different and contain a larger amount between the Bunmei (0.7 km3) and An-ei and
chamber volumes, β is the magma compress- (30–50 vol%) of phenobubbles. Using an ideal Taisho eruptions (∼1.5–1.8 km3). However, the
ibility, and ΔPc is the critical overpressure trig- gas equation of state, we predict that the pheno- presence of phenobubbles decreases the rate of
gering eruptions. As mentioned above, the short bubble volume fraction at chamber conditions pressure loading caused by recharge because
time span and the shallow depth of the magma during the Taisho eruption was about an order of of the increased compressibility of the magma
chamber (relatively cold crust) prevent any sig- magnitude greater than for the Bunmei eruption (Townsend et al., 2019). Yet the repose time
nificant non-elastic deformation of the host rock (Supplemental Material). between An-ei and Taisho is about half of that
to accommodate a fast-growing magma cham- The crystal size distributions (CSDs) for each between Bunmei and An-ei, which requires that
ber. If one considers the triggering overpressure eruption were studied recently by Yamashita and the increasing magma recharge rate more than
to remain roughly similar between consecutive Toramaru (2020) and suggest that the condi- compensates for the compressibility change.
eruptions, the main factor that controls eruption tions for crystallization have remained mostly Figure 3A shows the favored recharge rate
volume is magma compressibility. unchanged over the past 500 years. This may (lowest cumulative-volume-erupted misfit) and
We note that at the time of the onset of the appear to contradict our findings of increased its standard deviation for one of the MCMC
Bunmei eruption, the conditions are volatile magma recharge rate with time, but we note chains. Figure 3D shows all the chains (no stan-
undersaturated but close to saturation given our that the volume of magma erupted during the dard deviation shown for clarity). Even though
solubility model parameterized from rhyolite- Bunmei, An-ei, and Taisho events each range the power-law exponent can vary in the pos-
MELTS (Ghiorso and Gualda, 2015). Therefore, from 3% to 6% of the volume of the estimated terior distributions (see Fig. 1), the modeled
as the Bunmei eruption proceeds, phenobubble magma chamber. The time-integrated volume recharge rates are very similar over the 500-year
exsolution is predicted in all simulations. Even of magma recharge over the 500 years amounts span. Importantly, the calculated recharge rate
if only <1 vol% phenobubbles are present, they to 15% of the volume of the chamber. Over this increases by nearly an order of magnitude over
the past 500 years, which is significant. We note of the system over time and promote hysteresis of magma supply rate over time scales that
that the values calculated here are consistent in the eruption cycle. far exceed what we can infer from geodetic
with geodetic estimates (Hickey et al., 2016). observations.
The time-integrated volume of magma sup- CONCLUSIONS
plied to the shallow magma chamber of Sakura- We combine field and textural data from ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
jima over the past 500 years yields similar values three large historical eruptions at Sakurajima We acknowledge the funding from the Japan Society
for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and from the U.S.
(∼3 km3) irrespective of the choice of admis- with a numerical model to invert for the evolu- National Science Foundation (2121655) to Huber. The
sible solutions within our converged data set tion of the magma supply rate through time. The authors acknowledge two anonymous reviewers for
(see Fig. 4). We note that while the estimated results point to a well-constrained temporal evo- constructive comments that improved the manuscript.
recharge volume is well constrained, the dif- lution of the supply rate increasing by nearly an The authors thank Makoto Sekiguchi for the prepara-
tion and density measurements of pumice samples and
ferences in recharge rate functions caused by order of magnitude over the past 500 years. The
Okuyama Sangyo for sampling permission.
the trade-offs between A, B, and c can seriously modeling results are in excellent agreement with
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Figure 4. Mass budget in the open shallow magma chamber at Sakurajima inferred from the rhyolite-MELTS: Contributions to Mineralogy
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