Short and Long Term Volcano Instability Studies at Concepción Volcano, Nicaragua Jose Armando Saballos University of South Florida, [email protected]
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University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School January 2013 Short and Long Term Volcano Instability Studies at Concepción Volcano, Nicaragua Jose Armando Saballos University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the Geology Commons, and the Geophysics and Seismology Commons Scholar Commons Citation Saballos, Jose Armando, "Short and Long Term Volcano Instability Studies at Concepción Volcano, Nicaragua" (2013). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4757 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Short and Long Term Volcano Instability Studies at Concepcion´ Volcano, Nicaragua by Jose´ A. Saballos A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Geology College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Co-Major Professor: Charles B. Connor, Ph.D. Co-Major Professor: Rocco Malservisi, Ph.D. Sarah E. Kruse, Ph.D. Peter La Femina, Ph.D. Timothy H. Dixon, Ph.D. Date of Approval: May 1, 2013 Keywords: Concepcion´ volcano, residual Bouguer anomaly, GPS baseline, volcano spreading, time series analysis, Nicaragua Copyright c 2013, Jose´ A. Saballos DEDICATION To my son Armando Antonio, my wife Edith, my parents Armando & Mar´ıa, my sisters Carolina & Jacqueline, my brother Pabhel my nieces Helen, Martha, Mar´ıa del Pilar & Cristina. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisors Professor Charles B. Connor and Professor Rocco Malservisi, and the rest of my PhD committee for their great patience and guidance throughout my program at USF. Field assistance from Koji, Phable, Chuck, Laura, Lara, Sean, Adam, and Ometepe Ex- pedition people is highly appreciated. Dual-frequency GPS equipment borrowed from UNAVCO for several campaigns, and the differential GPS kit from CIGEO-UNAN-Managua made possible the success of my gravity and geodetic studies at Concepcion.´ I benefited from invaluable lo- gistic support from Angelica,´ Allan, Hoffman, Antonio, Virginia, Emilio, Julio, Wilfried, Martha N. and Rosario from Direccion´ de Geof´ısica de INETER. I also want to thank my lab mates and grad-colleagues: Leah, Mikel, Ana, Alain, Sophie, John P., Heather, Wayne, Mel, Koji, John O., Sylvain, Aurelie, Catie, Jacob and Ophelia. The co-authors of my research papers are thanked for their suggestions, ideas, and patience. Mike Ramsey from Pittsburgh University provided some ASTER scenes, and the other ASTER imageries were acquired through the GEO-GRID project (http://www.geogrid.org /en/index.html). Access to the Landsat data was possible through the Glo- vis server (http://glovis. usgs.gov/). Financial support from the USF Geology Department made possible my staying in the PhD program and in the US. Funding for field research was also pro- vided by the USF Geology Department and the Institute for the Study of the Latin America and the Caribbean. Many other people in the Geology Department encouraged me to keep going and made my life easier with paperwork, and many other things, and I will be in debt to them, especially Judy, Mandy, Mary, Lynn, Paul B. and Connie. Gracias a toda mi familia alla´ en Nicaragua, te amo hijo, tambien´ te amo mi nena. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES iii LIST OF FIGURES iv ABSTRACT vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2 GRAVITY AND GPS OF CONCEPCION´ VOLCANO, NICARAGUA 3 2.1 Introduction 3 2.2 Tectonic and Geological setting 4 2.3 Concepcion´ volcano 8 2.4 Gravity 10 2.4.1 Data and processing 10 2.4.2 Estimate of the bulk density of Concepcion´ volcano 11 2.4.3 Description of gravity anomalies 13 2.4.4 Modeling gravity data with GROWTH2.0 15 2.5 Geodetic GPS time series 18 2.5.1 Data and processing 18 2.5.2 GPS results 22 2.6 Discussion and Conclusions 26 CHAPTER 3 RELATIVELY SHORT-TERM CORRELATION AMONG DEFORMA- TION, DEGASSING AND SEISMICITY: A CASE STUDY FROM CON- CEPCION´ VOLCANO, NICARAGUA 32 3.1 Introduction 32 3.2 Concepcion´ volcano 33 3.2.1 2010 eruption 34 3.3 Data collection and analysis 35 3.3.1 Geodetic GPS data 35 3.3.2 Real–time seismic amplitude data 35 3.3.3 Remotely-sensed SO2 data 37 3.3.4 Data gaps 38 3.4 Results 38 3.5 Modeling 44 3.6 Discussion and Conclusions 47 i CHAPTER 4 LAHAR DELINEATION FROM SATELLITE DATA AT CONCEPCION´ VOLCANO 50 4.1 Introduction 50 4.2 Concepcion´ volcano 52 4.3 Slope stability of Concepcion´ volcano 54 4.3.1 Slope aspect of Concepcion´ volcano 56 4.4 Remote sensing of lahars 57 4.5 Satellite data and methodology 59 4.6 Results 61 4.7 Discussion 65 4.8 Conclusions 70 4.9 Recommendations 71 REFERENCES 73 APPENDICES 84 Appendix A Supplementary figures for Chapter 2 85 Appendix B Concepcion’s´ volcano gravity data 98 Appendix C PERL script to compute the complete terrain correction for gravity data 108 Appendix D Supplementary figures for Chapter 3 116 ABOUT THE AUTHOR End Page ii LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 List of input/initial parameters used in GROWTH2.0 (Camacho et al., 2011). Table 2.2 summarized main results. 17 Table 2.2 List of output parameters from GROWTH2.0 (Camacho et al., 2011) using as input the data shown in Table 2.1. 18 Table 2.3 Concepcion´ volcano’s GPS stations’ coordinates in the WGS-84 reference ellipsoid. 24 Table 3.1 Parameters of the open pipe model (Bonaccorso and Davis, 1999) used to ex- plain the geodetic GPS deformation observed at Concepcion´ volcano during the 2010 erupting phase. 47 Table 4.1 Reported lahars at Concepcion´ volcano since last decade 56 Table 4.2 Planimetric area inundated by lahars at Concepcion´ volcano. 66 Table B.1 Gravity data gathered at Concepcion´ volcano, Nicaragua, during campaigns carried out between 2007 and 2010. 98 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 Location of Ometepe Island on the western side of Lake Nicaragua. 6 Figure 2.2 Residual gravity anomaly interpolated using the cubic spline algorithm draped atop of a shaded relief map of Ometepe Island. 14 Figure 2.3 3-D inversion of the gravity data shown in Figure 2.2 using the GROWTH2.0 model developed by Camacho et al., (2011). 19 Figure 2.4 3-D display of the location of the total anomalous center of masses obtained from the gravity data inversion using GROWTH2.0. 20 Figure 2.5 CON1-SINT baseline changes running NW-SE across the volcano shown in the inset. 25 Figure 2.6 MOYO-SABA baseline change running W-NE across the volcano. 26 Figure 3.1 Shaded relief map of Concepcion´ volcano. 36 Figure 3.2 Time series of the 2010 and 2011 data used in this study. 40 Figure 3.3 Periodograms. 42 Figure 3.4 Cross-Correlograms among all time series. 43 Figure 3.5 Schematic representation of the open pipe model, after Bonaccorso and Davis (1999). 46 Figure 4.1 Geometric relationships used by Iverson et al. (1998) to derive the semi- empirical relationships of a debris-flow’s. 53 Figure 4.2 Shaded relief map of Concepcion´ volcano showing main towns. 55 Figure 4.3 Slope map of Concepcion´ volcano generated from a 20-m-resolution digital elevation model produced in 2004. 58 Figure 4.4 Comparison of different approaches to highlight debris flows on Concepcion´ using the same Landsat 7 image acquired on January 27, 2001. 62 Figure 4.5 False color composite Landsat image, acquired on January 27, 2001 produced by the band combination R: band 4, G: ARVI. 64 iv Figure 4.6 Temporal evolution of the lahar deposits heading down to La Flor town from the western slopes of Concepcion´ volcano. 65 Figure 4.7 Temporal evolution of the lahar deposits of the flows threatening Los Ramos town southeastern side of Concepcion´ volcano. 67 Figure 4.8 Temporal evolution of the lahar deposits north of San Jose´ del Sur town SSW slopes of Concepcion´ volcano. 68 Figure 4.9 Time series of inundated areas by lahar deposits extracted from satellite data. 68 Figure A.1 Simple Bouguer anomaly map computed using a density of 2500 kg m−3 used in gravitational spreading models (e.g. Borgia and van Wyk de Vries, (2003)). 85 Figure A.2 Simple Bouguer anomaly map computed using a density of 1539 kg m−3 pro- vided with the 1-D Nettleton (Nettleton, 1939) and Parasnis’(Parasnis, 1997) methods. 86 Figure A.3 3-D inversion of the gravity data shown in Figure 2.2 using the GROWTH2.0 model developed by Camacho et al., (2011). 87 Figure A.4 3-D inversion of the gravity data shown in Figure 2.2 using the GROWTH2.0 model developed by Camacho et al., (2011). 88 Figure A.5 Time series for the three components of station CON1 for all the campaigns. 89 Figure A.6 Time series for the three components of station COS2. 90 Figure A.7 Time series for the three components of station MOYO. 91 Figure A.8 Time series for the three components of station SABA. 92 Figure A.9 Time series for the three components of station SINZ. 93 Figure A.10 Time series changes for the Longitude component of all stations around Con- cepcion´ volcano during April through July 2010. 94 Figure A.11 Time series changes for the Latitude component of all stations around Con- cepcion´ volcano during April through July 2010.