Taupō: an overview of New Zealand's youngest supervolcano

ABSTRACT

Taupō volcano (New Zealand) is distinguished as the source of Earth's youngest supereruption (∼25.5 ka), with Lake Taupō occupying the resulting caldera. Taupō has also produced eruptions of a wide variety of sizes, styles and associated landscape responses over a ∼350 kyr period. Early Taupō (>54 ka) is poorly demarcated, merging with Maroa to the north, and is represented by widely scattered, geochemically distinct, effusive domes and explosive eruption products from vents all around the modern lake. Taupō had two independent magmatic systems from 54–25.5 ka, one that led to the Oruanui event focussed beneath the area of the modern lake and a second, northeast of the lake that has remained active to the present. Following the Oruanui supereruption, the rebuilt modern hyperactive Taupō magmatic system is primarily focussed beneath the lake and has generated 25 rhyolitic eruptions since ∼12 ka. The young rhyolite magmas come from an evolving silicic magma reservoir, but vary widely in their eruptive sizes and destructive potential. In the modern era Taupō experiences unrest every decade or so, but uncertainties remain over the nature of the magma reservoir and the processes that drive unrest or eruptive activity that require new geophysical data and interpretations.

KEYWORDS:

• Caldera
• Taupō volcano
• Taupo
• explosive eruption
• rhyolite
• magmatic system
• catastrophic flooding
• volcano unrest

Acknowledgements

We thank Alexa Van Eaton for providing images and James Muirhead, Pilar Villamor, Melissa Rotella, Martha Savage, Sylvia Tapuke, Bubs Smith, Brad Scott, Peter Otway, Susan Ellis, John Gamble, Stephen Bannister, Rewi Newnham and Mike Rosenberg for valuable discussions. We also thank James Scott for his editorial handling and advice and Jim Cole and an anonymous reviewer for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge support from the ECLIPSE project [contract RTVU1704] funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and past and current funding provided by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund [grant numbers VUW0813; VUW1627].