A long-dormant underwater volcano near Antarctica has woken up, triggering a swarm of 85,000 earthquakes.
Scientists at the research stations on King George Island, one of the South Shetland Islands, were the first to feel the rumblings of small quakes. Word soon got back to Cesca and his colleagues around the world, some of whom were collaborating on separate projects with the researchers on the island.The team wanted to understand what was going on, but King George Island is remote, with just two seismic stations nearby, Cesca said.
They also looked at data from more far-flung seismic stations and from satellites circling Earth that use radar to measure shifting at ground level, the study authors reported April 11 in the journalThe nearby stations are rather simple, but they were good for detecting the tiniest quakes. More distant stations, meanwhile, use more sophisticated equipment and can thus paint a more detailed picture of the larger quakes.
By piecing these data together, the team was able to create a picture of the underlying geology that triggered this massive earthquake swarm, Cesca said. The two largest earthquakes in the series were a magnitude 5.9 quake in October 2020 and a magnitude 6.0 quake in November. After the November quake, seismic activity waned. The quakes seemed to move the ground on King George Island around 4.3 inches , the study found.Only 4 percent of that displacement could be directly explained by the earthquake; the scientists suspect the movement of magma into the crust largely accounts for the dramatic shifting of the ground.
"What we think is that the magnitude 6 somehow created some fractures and reduced the pressure of the magma dike," Cesca said.But as of yet, there is no direct evidence for an eruption; to confirm that the massive shield volcano blew its top, scientists would have to send a mission to the strait to measure the bathymetry, or seafloor depth, and compare it to historical maps, he said.
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