Monitoring the reawakening of Canary Islands' Teide Volcano

Abstract

Following more than 30 years of seismic and volcanic quiescence, the Canary Islands region located off the northwestern coast of Africa started to show signs of seismovolcanic activity at the end of 2003 (Figure 1). In spring 2004, there was a significant increase in the number of seismic events (a mixture of volcano‐tectonic events and regional earthquakes with pure volcanic events such as tremors and long‐period signals) located inland on Tenerife Island. The increase ofactivity in 2004 coincided with an increase of fumarolic activity at the Teide volcano on Tenerife Island, an increase in the emission of carbon dioxide in the northwestern part of the island, and changes in the gravimetric field on the northern flank of the volcano. After several seismic events had been felt by the population, the first alert level was declared by the civil protection division of the local government.This apparent reawakening of Teide, which last erupted in 1909, provides an opportunity to study from the initial stages the reactivation of this volcanic area and its related phenomena.

Surface deformation studies of Tenerife Island, Spain from joint GPS-DInSAR observations

“…1-2). For the past 100 years, volcanoes of the central volcanic complex (CVC) on Tenerife Island were quiescent, but a recent increase in seismic activity around the island [8] as well as diffuse emission of carbon dioxide along a zone known as the Santiago Rift [11] and increasing fumarolic activity at the summit of Teide volcano [7] suggest their reawakening.…”

Near-Real time analysis of seismic data of active volcanoes: Software implementations of time sequence data analysis

“…The bottom envelope of the PSD is tracked, updated daily after processing 24-h intervals, and compared with previous days. The system has been monitoring the activity of Teide -Pico Viejo volcanic complex since June 2004 and has proven very useful to track changes in the behavior of processes (García et al, 2006). Figure 4a displays the evolution of the integrated PSD amplitude and Fig.…”

“…After more than 30 years of seismic and volcanic quiescence, at the end of 2003 the region around the Canary Islands (Spain) started to show signs of seismic and volcanic activity (García et al, 2006), in particular in the northern part of the island of Tenerife. Moreover, the seismic noise recorded in Tenerife since 2004 contains signals of possible volcanic origin (Carniel et al, 2008a(Carniel et al, , 2008bTárraga et al, 2006b;Tárraga, 2007) and a clear interaction between seismic events and the continuous background noise seismic signals has been reported (Tárraga et al, 2006b).…”

Recent unrest at Canary Islands' Teide Volcano?

“…Nevertheless, a recent article [Garcia et al, 2006] insists on the reawakening of Teide based on the aforementioned seismicity and volcanic gas emissions. In support of the pre diction of increasing volcanic activity, these authors have cited two apparently new fea tures: fumaroles at the summit crater of Teide and a new fumarole inside the Orotava Valley.…”