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Geologist fault suspected volcanic activity as source of Mount Edgecombe earthquakes

Geologist fault suspected volcanic activity as source of Mount Edgecombe earthquakes

 



The “swarm” of the April 11, 2022 earthquake was located under the crater of Mount Edgecombe, which itself is part of a larger volcanic field called the Southwest Fault. All of these geological features stem from the Queen Charlotte Fault, the boundary between the North American and Pacific plates located only 12 km offshore. (Alaska Earthquake Center photo)

A marine geologist and leading researcher of the Queen Charlotte Fault believes that the recent earthquake “swarm” under Mount Edgecombe near Sitka is consistent with volcanic activity.

Dr. Gary Greene doesn’t suggest an eruption is imminent – if at all – but he believes the evidence points to upward movement of magma down Mount Edgecombe, which has lie dormant for centuries.

The Queen Charlotte Fault stretches offshore in southeastern Alaska, almost completely straight, for more than 500 miles.

It’s a rare geologic feature – called a “leaky shift fault” – where the North American and Pacific plates are constantly sliding past each other.

As it represents a plate boundary, the Queen Charlotte Fault is deep extending through the Earth’s crust into the mantle. Thousands of years ago, the rift’s movement opened a channel in the crust, forcing molten magma through it and forming Mount Edgecombe’s volcano.

Dr. Gary Green believes that the April 11 earthquake swarm indicates that the process may be underway again.

“When the magma starts to go towards the surface, it melts the rocks that are there again and breaks up those rocks, and the faulting is what causes the earthquake,” Greene said. “When the magma starts going up into the crust and getting close to the surface, you start to have these low-magnitude earthquakes, which I had last week (April 11th). And then it could shut down, which it looks like now. But it could start again. At any time, if the rift moved further, it could cause it to expand again and then cause more magma to start arriving towards the surface.”

Greene retired from a long career with the USGS. He is Professor Emeritus of the Moss Landing Marine Lab at San Jose State University, and serves as a faculty position at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratory.

But his recent specialty has been mapping the Queen Charlotte undersea fault, and the Mount Edgecombe volcano was a product of that fault. Queen Charlotte is tectonically active, and reliably produces measurable earthquakes – which usually spread laterally along the fault.

The “swarm” of April 11 was under the mountain, and the earthquakes seemed to migrate upwards from the depths of the crust to shallow depths. But like his counterparts at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, Green says it’s too early to make bad predictions.

“The good sign is that this might just be a bump,” Green said. “It just started and there wasn’t a lot of pressure below, or a lot of stretching, to make this thing really start to break toward the surface in an explosive event, but it could also be a precursor to what might happen at some point in the future.”

Mount St. Helens, as seen during its eruption in May 1980. The stratigraphic volcanoes of the falls were produced as a result of plate immersion. According to Greene, an eruption of Mount Edgecombe is located – if it occurs – along a “leaky diversion fault” (or plate boundary). (USGS photo)

Most Sitkan now probably imagine Mount Edgecombe blowing its summit, ash clouds billowing into the sky like the famous eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Once again, Greene says, the Queen Charlotte’s fault structure likely won’t lead to anything dramatic. He imagines something more tame.

“This volcano is not like the volcanoes that sit off Seattle, for example. And it’s not like St. Helens volcano. So these types of volcanoes generally have very little explosive activity at the start of an eruption. It’s going to come out a lot of ash. But generally, after Over a period of time it decreases and they become more similar to the type of Hawaiian volcano.”

One of the most active volcanoes in Hawaii is not located on the Big Island itself, but rather just outside. This may be a possibility for Mount Edgecumbe, Greene says, which is not a single volcanic peak but several craters in a large volcanic field along the “Southwest Rift” that connects Kruzof Island – where Mount Edgecumbe is located – to the Queen Charlotte Fault 12 kilometers away, under Seabed. A volcanic eruption somewhere on the rift is a similar possibility to an eruption on Mount Edgecombe – no one knows for sure at the moment. Despite being a student primarily responsible for the error, Green is happy that the USGS is showing an active interest in what’s going on at Mount Edgecumbe. “If I were to really study the volcano in any detail, I’d like to get some tools out there,” he says.

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2/ https://www.kcaw.org/2022/04/22/fault-geologist-suspects-volcanic-activity-as-source-of-mt-edgecumbe-quakes/

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