Two new, rare, high-effusion outburst eruptions at Rarog and Heno Paterae on Io

Near-infrared monitoring of Io and detection of a violent outburst on 29 August 2013

“…This outburst completes an unprecedented trio of volcanic outbursts observed on Io in August of 2013, following the detections at Rarog and Heno Paterae earlier in the month (de Pater et al, 2014a). All three events are believed to be violent lava fountain episodes typically observed less than once a year Davies, 1996).…”

“…To avoid confusion, we note that the 2-lm to 5-lm radiant flux ratio discussed here refers to the thermal emission from an individual volcanic site, while the 5-lm/2-lm flux ratio discussed in Section 2.2 refers to Io's disk integrated intensity, which is generally dominated by reflected sunlight. The 201308C event, as well as the Rarog Patera and Heno Patera outbursts that took place earlier in August 2013 (de Pater et al, 2014a), plots in both figures in the same region as the most energetic lava fountain episodes previously seen on Io. The total emitted power emitted over all wavelengths for 201308C is between 15 and >25 TW, more powerful than the Rarog and Heno outbursts combined (14 TW), and only a factor of a few below the violent eruption at Surt in 2001 (78 TW), which was the most energetic outburst yet seen (Marchis et al, 2002).…”

“…In Sections 3 and 4, we present the detection and characterization of an energetic lava fountaining event that we observed from its early stages through its rapid decay over the subsequent days. We detected the event on UT 2013 August 29, and denote it 201308C as the third outburst in August 2013, following the previous events at Heno and Rarog Paterae (de Pater et al, 2014a).…”

“…The timing was fortuitous: the simultaneous observations were planned as part of a follow-up program observing the outbursts at Heno and Rarog Paterae detected on August 15 (de Pater et al, 2014a).…”

“…On August 15, two outbursts were detected near Rarog and Heno Paterae (de Pater et al, 2014a), and the observations presented in this paper were initially scheduled to provide followup observations to chart their evolution. We observed the sites of these outbursts on UT August 29, September 5, and September 7 at 3.78 lm; the locations are shown in Fig.…”