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Julien Chaput
Public Documents
1
Shear velocity evidence of upper crustal magma storage beneath Valles Caldera
Justin Wilgus
and 4 more
October 06, 2022
Valles Caldera was formed by large rhyolitic eruptions at ~1.6 and 1.23 Ma and it hosts post-caldera rhyolitic deposits as young as ~70 ka, but the contemporary state of the magmatic system is unclear. Local seismicity beneath Valles Caldera is rare and shear-velocity (Vs) structure has not been previously imaged. Here, we present the first local Vs tomography beneath Valles Caldera using ambient noise Rayleigh dispersion from a ~71 km transect of nodal seismographs with mean spacing of ~750 m. An ~6 km wide low-Vs anomaly (Vs<2.1 km/s) is located at ~3-10 km depth within the 1.23 Ma caldera’s ring fracture. Assuming magma in textural equilibrium, the new tomography suggests that melt fractions up to ~17-22% may be present within the upper crustal depth range where previously erupted rhyolites were stored.