ALBERT

Description: The 2021 volcanic eruption at La Palma, Canary Islands, was the island’s most voluminous historical eruption. Little is known about this volcano’s feeding system. During the eruption, seismicity was distributed in two clusters at ~10-14 km and ~33-39 km depth, separated by an aseismic zone. This gap coincides with the location of weak seismic swarms in 2017-2021 and where petrological data have implied pre-eruptive magma storage. Here we use seismological methods to understand the seismic response to magma transfer, with 8,488 hypocentral relocations resolving small-scale seismogenic structures, and 156 moment tensors identifying stress heterogeneities and principal axes flips. Results suggest a long-lasting preparatory stage with the progressive destabilisation of an intermediate, mushy reservoir, and a co-eruptive stage with seismicity controlled by the drainage and interplay of two localised reservoirs. Our study provides new insights into the plumbing system that will improve the monitoring of future eruptions in the island

Description: Understanding and constraining the source of geodetic deformation in volcanic areas is an important component of hazard assessment. Here, we analyse deformation and seismicity for one year before the March 2021 Fagradalsfjall eruption in Iceland. We generate a high-resolution catalogue of 39,500 earthquakes using optical cable recordings and develop a poroelastic model to describe three pre-eruptional uplift and subsidence cycles at the Svartsengi geothermal field, 8 km west of the eruption site. We find the observed deformation is best explained by cyclic intrusions into a permeable aquifer by a fluid injected at 4 km depth below the geothermal field, with a total volume of 0.11 ± 0.05 km3 and a density of 850 ± 350 kg m–3. We therefore suggest that ingression of magmatic CO2 can explain the geodetic, gravity and seismic data, although some contribution of magma cannot be excluded.

Description: The GFZ organizes annually International Training Courses on “Seismology, Seismic Data Analysis, Hazard Assessment and Risk Mitigation”. They provide theoretical fundamentals and practical training for geo-scientists and engineers from countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The courses are being supported by the German Federal Foreign Office and are a contribution to the global UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).In line with the growing demand by participants in former courses for mainly practice-oriented training and workshop discussions related to case studies, the course program comprises, besides introductory and state-of-the-art review lectures on the various subjects of earthquake seismology and risk assessment, extensive practical exercises, demonstrations, workshop discussions and scientific excursions. Generally, the course program aims at developing interdisciplinary problem understanding, acquaintance with the theoretical fundamentals and basic features of modern instrumentation, commonly used models and algorithms as well as developing practical skills in data evaluation and analysis. The courses are being announced through the GFZ website, the EMSC, and IRIS as well as printed information. Additional ad-hoc sponsors are mainly from the hosting institutions and governments in case of regional courses in Asia, Africa, or Latin America.Since 1992 these 4-week courses are held alternately as world-wide open courses in Potsdam or as regional courses in earthquake-prone countries in Asia, Africa, or Latin America (2006 Kyrgyzstan, 2008 Costa Rica, 2010 Turkey, 2012 Morocco, 2014 Colombia, 2016 Myanmar, and 2018 Ghana). Many of the former course participants became project partner in ongoing research projects of German and European institutions.

Description: This data set contains measurements of an underground hydraulic fracture experiment at Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory in May and June 2015. The experiment tested various injection schemes for rock fracture stimulation and monitored the resulting seismicity. The primary purpose of the experiment is to identify injection schemes that provide rock fracturing while reducing seismicity or at least mitigate larger seismic events. In total, six tests with three different injection schemes were performed in various igneous rock types. Both the injection process and the accompanied seismicity were monitored. For injection monitoring, the water flow and pressure are provided and additional tests for rock permeability. The seismicity was monitored in both triggered and continuous mode during the tests by high-resolution acoustic emission sensors, accelerometers and broadband seismometers. Both waveform data and seismicity catalogs are provided.

Description: In this article, a high-resolution acoustic emission sensor, accelerometer, and broadband seismometer array data set is made available and described in detail from in situ experiments performed at Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory in May and June 2015. The main goal of the hydraulic stimulation tests in a horizontal borehole at 410m depth in naturally fractured granitic rock mass is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of generating multi-stage heat exchangers in a controlled way superiorly to former massive stimulations applied in enhanced geothermal projects. A set of six, sub-parallel hydraulic fractures is propagated from an injection borehole drilled parallel to minimum horizontal in situ stress and is monitored by an extensive complementary sensor array implemented in three inclined monitoring boreholes and the nearby tunnel system. Three different fluid injection protocols are tested: constant water injection, progressive cyclic injection, and cyclic injection with a hydraulic hammer operating at 5 Hz frequency to stimulate a crystalline rock volume of size 30m30m30m at depth. We collected geological data from core and borehole logs, fracture inspection data from an impression packer, and acoustic emission hypocenter tracking and tilt data, as well as quantified the permeability enhancement process. The data and interpretation provided through this publication are important steps in both upscaling laboratory tests and downscaling field tests in granitic rock in the framework of enhanced geothermal system research. Data described in this paper can be accessed at GFZ Data Services under https://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.2.6.2023.004 (Zang et al., 2023).