Abstract
Large earthquakes provoke unrest in volcanic areas hundreds of kilometres away from their epicentre. For example, earthquakes can induce ground deformation1, thermal anomalies2, additional earthquakes1, hydrological changes3 or eruptions4,5,6,7,8 in volcanic regions. Two earthquakes in the Chilean subduction zone, in 1906 and 1960, triggered eruptions in the Andean southern volcanic zone within one year9, yet no significant eruptions in the past three years are clearly associated with the 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule, Chile earthquake. We use satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) and night-time thermal infrared data to analyse subtle changes in ground deformation and thermal activity at volcanoes in the southern volcanic zone since 2010. We document unprecedented subsidence of up to 15 cm in five volcanic areas within weeks of the earthquake, but no detectable thermal changes. We suggest that the deformation is related to coseismic release of fluids from hydrothermal systems documented at three of the five subsiding regions10,11. The depth and shape of these hydrothermal reservoirs can also be constrained by our deformation data, implying that coseismic volcano subsidence could be used to prospect for geothermal resources. Similar subsidence observed at Japanese volcanoes following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake12 suggests this phenomenon is widespread.
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Change history
16 July 2013
In the version of this Letter originally published online, the published online date was incorrect; it should have read 1 July 2013. This has been corrected in all versions of the Letter.
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Acknowledgements
ALOS data were provided by JAXA, with access provided from the Alaska Satellite Facility and NASA. ERS and ENVISAT SAR imagery was acquired as a Category 1 research project from the European Space Agency. This work was partly supported by NASA grant NNX08AT02G, issued through the Science Mission Directorate’s Earth Science Division. J.A.J. and S.T.H. are supported by NASA graduate fellowships and F.A. is supported by CONICYT ‘Beca Chile.’ We thank M. Welch, A. K. Melkonian and N. Button for help with data analysis and Y. Fukushima, P. Sruoga, J. A. Naranjo, J. Clavero, C. Mohr, C-Y. Wang, E. Brodsky, M. Manga, B. Barnhart and F. Delgado for comments.
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M.E.P. oversaw the InSAR data analysis and wrote the paper with input from all authors. J.A.J. analysed the thermal and streamflow data and modelled the InSAR data, F.A. did the coseismic stress change modelling, S.T.H. did finite element modelling, and L.E.L. contributed field observations.
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Pritchard, M., Jay, J., Aron, F. et al. Subsidence at southern Andes volcanoes induced by the 2010 Maule, Chile earthquake. Nature Geosci 6, 632–636 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1855
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1855
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