The largest deep-ocean silicic volcanic eruption of the past century

© The Author(s), 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Science Advances 4 (2018): e1701121, doi:10.1126/sciadv.1701121.
The 2012 submarine eruption of Havre volcano in the Kermadec arc, New Zealand, is the largest deep-ocean eruption in history and one of very few recorded submarine eruptions involving rhyolite magma. It was recognized from a gigantic 400-km2 pumice raft seen in satellite imagery, but the complexity of this event was concealed beneath the sea surface. Mapping, observations, and sampling by submersibles have provided an exceptionally high fidelity record of the seafloor products, which included lava sourced from 14 vents at water depths of 900 to 1220 m, and fragmental deposits including giant pumice clasts up to 9 m in diameter. Most (>75%) of the total erupted volume was partitioned into the pumice raft and transported far from the volcano. The geological record on submarine volcanic edifices in volcanic arcs does not faithfully archive eruption size or magma production.
This research was funded by Australian Research Council Postdoctoral fellowships (DP110102196 and DE150101190 to R. Carey), a short-term postdoctoral fellowship grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (to R. Carey), National Science Foundation grants (OCE1357443 to B.H., OCE1357216 to S.A.S., and EAR1447559 to J.D.L.W.), and a New Zealand Marsden grant (U001616 to J.D.L.W.). J.D.L.W. and A.M. were supported by a research grant and PhD scholarship from the University of Otago. R.W. was supported by NIWA grant COPR1802. J.D.L.W. and F.C.-T. were supported by GNS Science grants CSA-GHZ and CSA-EEZ. M.J. was supported by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG) Program.