Feeding system beneath active volcanoes in central part of Iturup Island (Kuril Arc) inferred from local earthquake tomography

Abstract

Iturup is the largest island of the Kuril Arc with more than 20 Holocene volcanoes of which 9 considered active. Here we investigate the central part of the island where we deployed in 2022–2023 a portable network of 12 seismic stations. The data of this network together with several permanent stations in surrounding islands were used to identify almost 300 events and to perform seismic tomography based on the picked arrival times of the P and S seismic waves. A challenging problem was that most of the events were located outside the network, and we performed careful analysis to examine the actual capacity of inversion with such data to recover seismic velocity structures below the network. In the resulting model, we found a dominating high-velocity anomaly below the central part of the study area, which is bounded by zones of low velocities and high Vp/Vs ratio collocated with two active volcano complexes (Chirip to the north and Ivan Grozny to the south). Below the third volcano, Baransky, we observe a change of the Vp/Vs ratio from high at large depths to low at shallow depth, indicating the process of degassing, which is supported by strong fumarolic activity and hydrothermal manifestations around this volcano. At depths of more than 20 km, the feeding paths from Baransky and Ivan Grozny volcanoes seem to be connected in one anomaly representing a common magma source below the center of the island. This seems to be a common feature observed below several volcanic islands, such as Tenerife and El Hierro, where the high-velocity rigid core in a central part is surrounded by low-velocity flows associated with recent volcanic manifestations.