When:	April 14, 2017 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Where:	Building E25, Room 119	✔ Add to Calendar Add to Google Calendar
Categories:	Aviation and Environment

The What, When, Where, and Why of Supereruptions

Supereruptions are gigantic volcanic eruptions (�450 km^3 of magma) the likes of which we have never witnessed. Yet, this does not mean that we will never experience one. Such
enormous eruptions have the potential to wreak havoc on life, infrastructure, travel, and the
environment. Consequently, it is critical that we study past supereruptions to understand how, when, where, and why one might happen in the future. In addition, supereruption deposits are evidence that large volumes of magma existed in the crust multiple times in Earth’s history; thus, studying these systems can inform on the magmatic construction of Earth’s crust.

In this talk, I will address several outstanding and strongly debated questions regarding
supereruptive systems: Where in the crust do these magmas reside? What shape do they take? How long do they persist in the crust before erupting? When, why, and over what timescales does the eruptive process occur? How are the giant volumes of crystal-poor high-silica rhyolite magma involved in supereruptions generated? Answering these questions is important both for practical reasons (e.g., hazards preparation and mitigation) and intellectual ones (e.g., understanding crustal processes).

To address these questions, I combine information from multiple scales and perspectives (field studies, geochemistry, textural relations of crystals in rocks and melt inclusions in crystals, geochronology, geobarometry, phase-equilibria modeling, and diffusion modeling). Results from this work suggest that we can make some broad generalizations about supereruptive systems, but these systems have notable variability as well (e.g., their shape in the crust). This work also illustrates the power in using a multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary approach to addressing questions in the Earth Sciences.