Inside volcanoes: observing, understanding and modelling volcanic systems (INVOLVE)

The INVOLVE project is based on a strong synergy among four working groups having complementary expertise on the study of volcanic/magmatic systems. The project, making use of ground-breaking field, analytical, experimental, and computational approaches, will address the construction of a unified and integrated conceptual and physico-chemical model encompassing the volcanic system functioning over the full range of time scales (years to million-years), from magma production, accumulation to eruption. Expected results will be crucial to the general definition of the dynamics of magmatic systems, and to forecast their short-term potential hazards for human life and infrastructure. This model will help to better interpret monitoring data and anticipate volcanic eruptions, critically increasing our ability to mitigate volcanic risks on a regional to global scale. The island of Tenerife will be taken as a case study, since it presents a unique complexity, but it also offers an unbeatable opportunity to study the connection of processes that span from the Earth’s core to the surface.

INVOLVE is anchored on strong cross-disciplinary synergy between field and physical volcanology, petrology, isotope geochemistry, experimental petrology, magma rheology, geophysics, and mathematical modelling with a level of integration never attempted thus far. This will allow appositely collected observational and key missing experimental data to be combined in order to develop a new generation, community-wide, and fully coupled 4D thermo-fluid-mechanical-chemical model that will explain how volcanic systems work. The model will be open and continuously adapting to new knowledge. The case study will benefit from the large amount of data that already exist on this particular volcano, which will facilitate testing and progressively improving the model.

The model will try to answer the following questions:

1. origin and dynamics of the plume responsible for Canarias magmatism
2. conditions for partial melting in the mantle
3. which are the conditions for magma extraction from the source region
4. at what depth magma starts to differentiate
5. what is the physical nature of magma reservoirs and their time evolution?
6. at what rate does the magma differentiate, degas and exchange heat (and mass) to different country rocks, and to what extent this influences multiphase rheology and the dynamics of magma reservoirs?
7. how does magma degassing and heat loss affect physical and chemical properties of country rocks?
8. to what extent magma pressure variations affect host rocks response and vice versa?, ix) how rapidly do these conditions change?
9. how do they eventually affect magma ascent and resulting eruption style?
10. how frequently a magmatic reservoir fails and why?

Answering the above items requires, besides the implementation of a fully coupled 3D time-dependent model, improved constraints on material properties, the definition of plumbing systems geometry, the rate of processes, and conditions for magma ascent and occasional eruption.

This will be a collaborative project between CSIC, which will be the IP coordinator and responsible for the interaction with the ERC, the INGV, Italy, the University of Florence, Italy, and the CNRS, France. Moreover, in the case of CSIC this will be an initiative of its Research Thematic Platform Volcanism and Society.