Crustal deformation and magmatic processes at Laguna del Maule volcanic field (Chile): Geodetic measurements and numerical models

The Laguna del Maule (LdM) volcanic field in Chile is an exceptional example of postglacial rhyolitic volcanism in the Southern Volcanic Zone of the Andes. Since 2007, LdM has experienced an unrest episode characterized by high rates of deformation measured by interferometric analysis of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images acquired between 2007 and 2016, and data from the Global Positioning System (GPS) recorded since 2012 at five stations. The inflating region includes most of the 16--km-by--14--km ring of rhyolitic domes and coulees. The fastest-moving GPS station (MAU2) has a velocity vector of [[special character omited]72 +/- 4, 19 +/- 1, 194 +/- 3] mm/yr between 2012 and 2016 for the eastward, northward, and upward components, respectively. First, we model the InSAR observations assuming a rectangular dislocation in a half space with uniform elastic properties. The best time function for modeling the InSAR data set is a double exponential model with rates increasing from 2007 through 2010 and decreasing slowly since 2011. Modeling of historical uplift at Yellowstone, Long Valley, and Three Sisters volcanic fields suggests a common temporal evolution of vertical displacement rates. We hypothesize that magma intruding into an existing silicic magma reservoir is driving the surface deformation and present a new dynamic model to describe this process. A Newtonian fluid characterized by its viscosity, density, and pressure flows through a vertical conduit, intruding into a reservoir embedded in an elastic domain and leading to time-dependent surface deformation. Using a grid-search optimization, we minimize the misfit to the InSAR displacement data by varying the three parameters governing the analytical solution: the characteristic timescale tauP for magma propagation, the injection pressure, and the inflection time when the acceleration switches from positive to negative. For a spheroid with semi-major axis a = 6200 m, semi-minor axis c = 100 m, located at a depth of 4.5 km in a purely elastic half-space, the best fit to the InSAR data occurs for tauP = 9.5 years and an injection pressure rising to 11.5 MPa for two years. The volume flow rate increased to 1.2 m3/s for two years and then decreased to 0.7 m3/s in 2014. In 7.3 years, at least 187 million cubic meters of magma was injected.