Lava effusion rate evolution and erupted volume during the 2018 Kīlauea lower East Rift Zone eruption

The petrologic and degassing behavior of sulfur and other magmatic volatiles from the 2018 eruption of Kīlauea, Hawaiʻi: melt concentrations, magma storage depths, and magma recycling

“…Given the extensive CO 2 loss from Kīlauea melts during crustal ascent (Gerlach 1986;Anderson and Poland 2017), CO 2 degassing from the LERZ fissures themselves may only represent 2-5% of the total CO 2 emitted from the primary magmas that ultimately sourced the LERZ eruption (see Supplementary Materials for further discussion on petrologic method calculations and comparisons with measured gas ratios). Despite the large uncertainties in SO 2 emission rates, lava effusion rates, and pre-eruptive sulfur concentrations of LERZ melts, we share the conclusion of Kern et al (2020) and Dietterich et al (2021) that substantially more lava erupted from the LERZ fissures than the 0.8 km 3 summit caldera collapse volume would account for.…”

“…The 2018 lower East Rift Zone (LERZ) eruption of Kīlauea Volcano (Hawaiʻi, USA) provides a notable example of how multidisciplinary eruption monitoring coupled with detailed geochemistry can revise our understanding of volcanic processes at Kīlauea (Gansecki et al 2019;Neal et al 2019). The 2018 LERZ fissure eruption was one of Kīlauea's largest eruptions in > 200 years and was well monitored and sampled by the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (USGS-HVO) (Anderson et al 2019;Gansecki et al 2019;Neal et al 2019;Patrick et al 2019cPatrick et al , 2020bKern et al 2020;Shiro et al 2021;Dietterich et al 2021). Between May and August, fissures in the LERZ erupted 0.9 to ≥ 1.4 km 3 of dense rock equivalent (DRE) lava (Kern et al 2020;Dietterich et al 2021) and were accompanied by record-setting SO 2 gas emissions (Kern et al 2020) and a major summit caldera collapse (Anderson et al 2019).…”

“…The 2018 LERZ fissure eruption was one of Kīlauea's largest eruptions in > 200 years and was well monitored and sampled by the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (USGS-HVO) (Anderson et al 2019;Gansecki et al 2019;Neal et al 2019;Patrick et al 2019cPatrick et al , 2020bKern et al 2020;Shiro et al 2021;Dietterich et al 2021). Between May and August, fissures in the LERZ erupted 0.9 to ≥ 1.4 km 3 of dense rock equivalent (DRE) lava (Kern et al 2020;Dietterich et al 2021) and were accompanied by record-setting SO 2 gas emissions (Kern et al 2020) and a major summit caldera collapse (Anderson et al 2019). The historic events at Kilauea Volcano in 2018: summit collapse, rift zone eruption, and Mw6.9 earthquake Prior to the LERZ eruption, a remarkable dual-vent eruption had been occurring at Kīlauea (Patrick et al 2019b).…”

“…On August 2, the summit collapses abruptly ceased, and the LERZ eruptive activity sharply declined on August 4-5. The large volume of magma erupted from LERZ fissures amounts to > 10 years' worth of Kīlauea's average magma supply being erupted within three months (Poland et al 2014;Anderson and Poland 2017;Dietterich et al 2021).…”

“…Sustained SO 2 emission rates of > 100 kt/day during phase 3 activity at fissure 8 (F8) amounted to a ~ 20-fold increase in total SO 2 emissions from Kīlauea (Elias and Sutton 2012;Sutton and Elias 2014;Elias et al 2020;Kern et al 2020). Understanding the factors that contributed to this remarkable SO 2 output is important for constraining the eruption's lava and sulfur (S) budgets (Sutton et al 2003;Kern et al 2020;Dietterich et al 2021), and for improving our ability to anticipate and interpret future degassing activity and associated hazards.…”