Measurements of volcanic Sulfur and Carbon Emissions at high temporal Resolution
Geophysics
Final Report Abstract
During the project new emission flux and gas composition measurements at volcano Peteroa and volcano Copahue were undertaken. This two very active volcanoes on the border between Chile and Argentina offered an ideal place for testing new developed instruments (e.g. PITSA; MultiGAS-Argentina,etc.), gaining new insights into still poorly studied areas (particular Peteroa) and enhancing our collaboration with the University of Buenos Aires (prof. Mariano Agusto and Dr. Maria Clara Lamberti) and OVDAS (Claudia Bucery, Gabriela Velasquez, Oscar Valedrrama) and establishing further ones (e.g. Servicio Geologico Minero Argentino and CNEA-ICES Argentina). With the joint effort of all collaboration partners, logistical perfect support and organization from our Argentinian partners and the complementary knowledge of measurement techniques a significant new data set has been collected. For the first time at Peteroa a comparison of soil and plume emission comes to the result that the major emission of CO2 is focused on a “point source” – the lake inside crater 4. Already in other volcanic areas volcanic plume and soil gas emission have been compared and very different emission patterns have been observed. At a closed conduit volcano - Vulcano Island, Italy for instance more than 20% and at Masaya, an open conduit volcano in Nicaragua about 50% of the total emission are released via diffusive soil degassing. However, with the current data available from Peteroa only about 2 % of the total calculated CO2 output are degassed by diffusive soil degassing in the crater region, similar to available data from Erebus, Antarctica and Ol Doinyo Lengai, Tanzania. Certainly further studies in the surroundings are still necessary to assure no missing emission source on the flank of the volcano. Peteroa as well as Copahue appear to be relatively poor in their bromine content or at least in the oxidation of bromine in contrast to other volcanoes of the Andean chain. A use of the now more established collaboration would be desirable to discover the reasons for the poor bromine content of these two volcanoes. Further, collaboration between the university of Heidelberg and Buenos Aires in the technical developments of e.g. MultiGAS sensor techniques would lead to an improvement of the local volcanic monitoring in Argentina.
