Friday Seminar (10 March 2023) Chastity Aiken (IFREMER)

Title: Mayotte’s submarine volcano: seismicity, tomography, and the future seafloor observatory

 

Abstract:

Mayotte’s submarine volcano system was first identified in 2018 when several earthquakes and very-long-period earthquakes were seen on global seismic networks. The volcano’s presence was later confirmed in February 2019 in a sea campaign called MAYOBS, during which a new volcano edifice was discovered ~40 km offshore Mayotte. There was only 2 land stations on Mayotte at the time of the first MAYOBS campaign. We understood so little of Mayotte’s submarine volcano and the crisis that many more MAYOBS sea campaigns were conducted over a period of 4 years. In total, 23 sea campaigns were conducted to deploy/recover ocean-bottom seismometers – an unprecedented number of sea campaigns for an unprecedented submarine volcano eruption. In this talk, I will present a brief summary of seismological studies conducted by myself and the REVOSIMA (Mayotte Seismic and Volcanic Monitoring Network) seismology group: how we detected more 30k events and relocated more than 5,000 of them, the first tomographic image we have of the volcano system, and the future seafloor observatory that will be installed to monitor Mayotte’s submarine volcano in the future.