fields timanfaya lavaAt Lanzarote, three centuries after the eruption that created them (1730-1736), they still “shrink” by an average of 0.6 centimeters each year as they cool, suggesting that their thickness may have tripled. idea.
Anyone who has visited Timanfaya National Park or seen any of the promotional videos knows this at the visitor center. it is enough to bury a handful of straw for a little more than a meter for it to burn. or if water is poured into a pipe descending about ten meters, the earth returns it in the form of a steam geyser.
All of these phenomena occur at Islote de Hilario point, where the park’s greatest thermal anomalies have been detected, measuring 380 degrees six meters below ground and almost twice the temperature of 605 degrees at thirteen meters.
Seven researchers from the University of Leeds (UK), the Tenerife Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology (IPNA-CSIC), and the Japan Research Center for Geography and Shell Dynamics, chaired by Victoria Purcell and Eoin Reddin, are publishing this month. The journal ‘Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems’ is a study showing what is happening in the larger area of the park, about 20 square kilometers.
The Timanfaya eruption is one of the most spectacular eruptions known to man in historical times: it lasted for almost six years. (2,055 days), from September 1, 1730 to April 16, 1736, covered 200 square kilometers (a quarter of Lanzarote) with lava and spewed two to five cubic kilometers of material through a rift about 15 kilometers long. A landscape dotted with 30 volcanoes as a heritage.
Their numbers are better understood when compared, for example, with the last eruption to which the Canary Islands were exposed, the La Palma eruption in 2021, which lasted 85 days, covered 11.8 square kilometers of lava, released 0.21 square kilometers of material, and just formed. a related cone.
In fact, in the historical record There have only been two rift eruptions larger than Timanfaya in the entire world in the last 1100 years.The authors of this work recall the work of Laki in the 18th century and Eldgjá in the 10th century, both in Iceland.
This team reviewed three decades of satellite measurements of the relative height of the Timanfaya lavas above the sea; this revealed that they were “sinking” (actually shrinking through cooling) at a rate of six millimeters per year, which had significant effects.
The first and most obvious is Three centuries later, the lava has not cooled completely, at least below the surface., with what this means for the study of other eruptions; and the latter, and more relevant, suggest that the maximum thickness of the Timanfaya lava layer is between double and triple (100 to 150 meters), not a maximum of 60 meters as predicted to date.
As the authors themselves recall, the recent eruption in the Canary Islands left lava fields up to 60 meters thick, although the much less significant Cumbre Vieja eruption (although it had greater damage as it devastated a densely populated area).
And there’s a third consequence: The Timanfaya eruption probably spewed far more volcanic material than geologists had ever calculated, but would in no case pass Iceland’s record.