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The transport of Icelandic volcanic ash: insights from northern European cryptotephra records

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Date
30/10/2016
Author
Watson, E. J.
Swindles, G. T.
Stevenson, J. A.
Savov, I.
Lawson, I. T.
Keywords
Iceland
northern Europe
probabilistic modeling
shard size
travel distance
GB Physical geography
GE Environmental Sciences
Geophysics
Oceanography
Forestry
Ecology
Aquatic Science
Water Science and Technology
Soil Science
Geochemistry and Petrology
Earth-Surface Processes
Atmospheric Science
Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous)
Space and Planetary Science
Palaeontology
NDAS
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Abstract
Fine ash produced during volcanic eruptions can be dispersed over a vast area, where it poses a threat to aviation, human health, and infrastructure. We analyze the particle size distributions, geochemistry, and glass shard morphology of 19 distal (>1000 km from source) volcanic ash deposits distributed across northern Europe, many geochemically linked to a specific volcanic eruption. The largest glass shards in the cryptotephra deposits were 250 µm (longest axis basis). For the first time, we examine the replicability and reliability of glass shard size measurements from peatland and lake archives. We identify no consistent trend in the vertical sorting of glass shards by size within lake and peat sediments. Measuring the sizes of 100 shards from the vertical sample of peak shard concentration is generally sufficient to ascertain the median shard size for a cryptotephra deposit. Lakes and peatlands in close proximity contain cryptotephras with significantly different median shard size in four out of five instances. The trend toward a greater amount of larger shards in lakes may have implications for the selection of distal sites to constrain the maximum glass shard size for modeling studies. Although the 95th percentile values for shard size generally indicate a loss of larger shards from deposits at sites farther from the volcano, due to the dynamic nature of the controls on tephra transport even during the course of one eruption there is no simple relationship between median shard size and transport distance.
Citation
Watson , E J , Swindles , G T , Stevenson , J A , Savov , I & Lawson , I T 2016 , ' The transport of Icelandic volcanic ash: insights from northern European cryptotephra records ' , Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth , vol. 121 , no. 10 , pp. 7177-7192 . https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JB013350
Publication
Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JB013350
ISSN
2169-9313
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
This research was undertaken while Elizabeth Watson held a NERC-funded Doctoral Training grant (NE/K500847/1).
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/9914

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