Tilt signals at Mount Melbourne, Antarctica: evidence of a shallow volcanic source

Abstract

Mount Melbourne (74°21′ S, 164°43′ E) is a quiescent volcano located in northern Victoria Land, Antarctica. Tilt signals have been recorded on Mount Melbourne since early 1989 by a permanent shallow borehole tiltmeter network comprising five stations. An overall picture of tilt, air and permafrost temperatures over 15 years of continuous recording data is reported. We focused our observations on long-term tilt trends that at the end of 1997 showed coherent changes at the three highest altitude stations, suggesting the presence of a ground deformation source whose effects are restricted to the summit area of Mount Melbourne. We inverted these data using a finite spherical body source, thereby obtaining a shallow deflation volume source located under the summit area. The ground deformation observed corroborates the hypothesis that the volcanic edifice of Mount Melbourne is active and should be monitored multidisciplinarily.

• Tilt monitoring
• volcanic dynamics
• physics volcanology
• ground deformation
• Victoria Land.

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Acknowledgements

We are particularly indebted to Prof. Letterio Villari, who conceived the Mt. Melbourne tilt network and struggled hard to achieve it. We thank Mike Poland and an anonymous reviewer for their critical reading of the manuscript and constructive comments. We also thank F. Cannavò for the modelling programme codes and S. Conway for improving the English of this paper.

Notes

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