Magma pancakes beneath Indonesia's Lake Toba: Subsurface sources of mega-eruptions

Lake Toba, Indonesia

The tremendous amounts of lava that are emitted during super-eruptions accumulate over millions of years prior to the event in the Earth's crust. These reservoirs consist of magma that intrudes into the crust in the form of numerous horizontally oriented sheets resting on top of each other like a pile of pancakes.

A team of geoscientists from Novosibirsk, Paris and Potsdam presents these results in the current issue of Science. The scientists investigate the question on where the tremendous amounts of material that are ejected to from huge calderas during super-eruptions actually originate. Here we are not dealing with large volcanic eruptions of the size of Pinatubo of Mount St. Helens, here we are talking about extreme events: The Toba caldera in the Sumatra subduction zone in Indonesia originated from one of the largest volcanic eruption in recent Earth history, about 74,000 years ago. It emitted the enormous amount of 2,800 cubic kilometers of volcanic material with a dramatic global impact on climate and environment. Hereby, the 80 km long Lake Toba was formed.

Geoscientists were interested in finding out: How can the gigantic amounts of eruptible material required to form such a super volcano accumulate in the Earth's crust. Was this a singular event thousands of years ago or can it happen again?

Researchers from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences successfully installed a seismometer network in the Toba area to investigate these questions and provided the data to all participating scientists via the GEOFON data archive. GFZ scientist, Christoph Sens-Schönfelder, a co-author of the study explains: "With a new seismological method we were able to investigate the internal structure of the magma reservoir beneath the Toba-caldera. We found that the middle crust below the Toba supervolcano is horizontally layered." The answer thus lies in the structure of the magma reservoir. Here, below 7 kilometers the crust consists of many, mostly horizontal, magmatic intrusions still containing molten material.

New seismological technique

It was already suspected that the large volume of magma ejected during the supervolcanic eruption had slowly accumulated over the last few millions of years in the form of consequently emplaced intrusions. This could now be confirmed with the results of field measurements. The GFZ scientists used a novel seismological method for this purpose. Over a six-month period they recorded the ambient seismic noise, the natural vibrations which usually are regarded as disturbing signals. With a statistical approach they analyzed the data and discovered that the velocity of seismic waves beneath Toba depends on the direction in which the waves shear the Earth's crust. Above 7 kilometers depth the deposits of the last eruption formed a zone of low velocities. Below this depth the seismic anisotropy is caused by horizontally layered intrusions that structure the reservoir like a pile of pancakes. This is reflected in the seismic data.

Supervolcanoes

Not only in Indonesia, but also in other parts of the world there are such supervoclcanoes, which erupt only every couple of hundred thousand years but then in gigantic eruptions. Because of their size those volcanoes do not build up mountains but manifest themselves with their huge carter formed during the eruption -- the caldera. Other known supervolcanoes include the area of the Yellow-Stone-Park, volcanoes in the Andes, and the caldera of Lake-Taupo in New Zealand. The present study helps to better understand the processes that lead to such super-eruptions.

Source: Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences

No laughing matter: Nitrous oxide rose at end of last ice age

Researchers measured increases in atmospheric nitrous oxide concentrations about 16,000 to 10,000 years ago using ice from Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. Credit: Adrian Schilt

Nitrous oxide (N₂O) is an important greenhouse gas that doesn't receive as much notoriety as carbon dioxide or methane, but a new study confirms that atmospheric levels of (N₂O) rose significantly as the Earth came out of the last ice age and addresses the cause.

An international team of scientists analyzed air extracted from bubbles enclosed in ancient polar ice from Taylor Glacier in Antarctica, allowing for the reconstruction of the past atmospheric composition. The analysis documented a 30 percent increase in atmospheric nitrous oxide concentrations from 16,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. This rise in N2O was caused by changes in environmental conditions in the ocean and on land, scientists say, and contributed to the warming at the end of the ice age and the melting of large ice sheets that then existed.

The findings add an important new element to studies of how Earth may respond to a warming climate in the future. Results of the study, which was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation, are being published this week in the journal Nature.

"We found that marine and terrestrial sources contributed about equally to the overall increase of nitrous oxide concentrations and generally evolved in parallel at the end of the last ice age," said lead author Adrian Schilt, who did much of the work as a post-doctoral researcher at Oregon State University. Schilt then continued to work on the study at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

"The end of the last ice age represents a partial analog to modern warming and allows us to study the response of natural nitrous oxide emissions to changing environmental conditions," Schilt added. "This will allow us to better understand what might happen in the future."

Nitrous oxide is perhaps best known as laughing gas, but it is also produced by microbes on land and in the ocean in processes that occur naturally, but can be enhanced by human activity. Marine nitrous oxide production is linked closely to low oxygen conditions in the upper ocean and global warming is predicted to intensify the low-oxygen zones in many of the world's ocean basins. N2O also destroys ozone in the stratosphere.

"Warming makes terrestrial microbes produce more nitrous oxide," noted co-author Edward Brook, an Oregon State paleoclimatologist whose research team included Schilt. "Greenhouse gases go up and down over time, and we'd like to know more about why that happens and how it affects climate."

Nitrous oxide is among the most difficult greenhouse gases to study in attempting to reconstruct Earth's climate history through ice core analysis. The specific technique that the Oregon State research team used requires large samples of pristine ice that date back to the desired time of study -- in this case, between about 16,000 and 10,000 years ago.

The unusual way in which Taylor Glacier is configured allowed the scientists to extract ice samples from the surface of the glacier instead of drilling deep in the polar ice cap because older ice is transported upward near the glacier margins, said Brook, a professor in Oregon State's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

The scientists were able to discern the contributions of marine and terrestrial nitrous oxide through analysis of isotopic ratios, which fingerprint the different sources of N2O in the atmosphere.

"The scientific community knew roughly what the N2O concentration trends were prior to this study," Brook said, "but these findings confirm that and provide more exact details about changes in sources. As nitrous oxide in the atmosphere continues to increase -- along with carbon dioxide and methane -- we now will be able to more accurately assess where those contributions are coming from and the rate of the increase."

Atmospheric N2O was roughly 200 parts per billion at the peak of the ice age about 20,000 years ago then rose to 260 ppb by 10,000 years ago. As of 2014, atmospheric N2Owas measured at about 327 ppb, an increase attributed primarily to agricultural influences.
Although the N2O increase at the end of the last ice age was almost equally attributable to marine and terrestrial sources, the scientists say, there were some differences.

"Our data showed that terrestrial emissions changed faster than marine emissions, which was highlighted by a fast increase of emissions on land that preceded the increase in marine emissions," Schilt pointed out. "It appears to be a direct response to a rapid temperature change between 15,000 and 14,000 years ago."

That finding underscores the complexity of analyzing how Earth responds to changing conditions that have to account for marine and terrestrial influences; natural variability; the influence of different greenhouse gases; and a host of other factors, Brook said.

"Natural sources of N2O are predicted to increase in the future and this study will help up test predictions on how the Earth will respond," Brook said.

Source: Oregon State University

Is natural gas a 'bridge' to a hotter future?

This image shows a natural gas plant in Moss Landing, California. Credit: Carnegie President Matthew Scott

Natural gas power plants produce substantial amounts of gases that lead to global warming. Replacing old coal-fired power plants with new natural gas plants could cause climate damage to increase over the next decades, unless their methane leakage rates are very low and the new power plants are very efficient.

These are the principal findings of new research from Carnegie's Ken Caldeira and Xiaochun Zhang, and Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures that compares the temperature increases caused by different kinds of coal and natural gas power plants. Their work is published in Environmental Research Letters.

There is an ongoing debate among people concerned with power plants and the future of energy policy and greenhouse gas emissions. Does it makes sense to replace old coal-fired power plants with new natural gas power plants today, as a bridge to a longer-term transition toward near zero-emission energy generation technologies such as solar, wind, or nuclear power? A key issue in considering the decision has been the potential climate effects of natural gas versus coal. Studies have yielded different results by focusing on power plants with different characteristics and using different definitions of what it means to be "better" for climate.

Carnegie's Caldeira and Zhang, along with Myhrvold, aimed to identify the key factors that are responsible for most of the difference in greenhouse gas emissions between individual gas and coal plants. The key factors, they found, are power plant efficiency and, in the case of natural gas plants, methane leakage during the supply process. They used these factors to derive a simple model for resulting temperature change caused by the carbon dioxide and methane released by a particular plant.

The team chose a simple and understandable way to compare climate effects of different types of power plants. They predicted how much global warming would be produced by different kinds of power plants during and after their period of operation.

They found that because natural gas plants are overall more efficient than coal plants, producing more energy per unit of carbon, they could cause less warming in the long term. However, it all depends on the amount of methane leakage that occurs. Natural gas plants that leak a substantial amount of methane during their supply process can produce more warming than comparable coal plants.

"If there is substantial natural gas leakage, then building new natural gas plants would lead to more near term climate damage than using the old dirty coal plants," explained Caldeira. "But natural gas plants would help reduce other types of air pollution that damage our health, and would be somewhat better for climate in the long term."

If faced with the choice of shutting down either a typical coal plant or a typical gas plant and methane leakage from the natural gas plant is below about 2 percent of total fuel, there would be a short-term climate benefit to shutting down the coal plant instead of the natural gas plant, the team found. But if methane leakage would be greater than 2 percent, there would be less warming in the near term if the natural gas plant were shut down instead of the coal plant.

Regardless, the team emphasized that meeting upcoming greenhouse gas emission targets will require deeper emissions cuts than just building natural gas plants with low methane leakage. If natural gas is to be a part of a future near-zero emission energy economy, methods for capturing and storing carbon from gas-fired power plants will likely be necessary.

Source: Carnegie Institution