Examining the Interior of the Llaima Volcano, Chile: Evidence from Receiver Functions (2016)

Undergraduate: Jordan Bishop

Faculty Advisor: Jonathan Lees
Department: Geology

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The Llaima volcano is the second most active volcano in the southern Andes. However, despite its frequent eruptions and close proximity to the towns of Melipueco and Vilc¿¿n, not much is known about the interior of the volcano. In 2011, inverse modeling with InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) was applied to the volcano, producing the first images of what its magmatic system is like. However, seismic imaging of the interior of the volcano had yet to be conducted. This abstract outlines my senior honors thesis, where receiver functions were applied to produce the first seismic study of the interior of the Llaima volcano. After helping collect the data in January of last year, an iterative deconvolution technique was applied to teleseismic earthquakes recorded by seismometers near the volcano. Once receiver functions were calculated, various stacking techniques were applied to elucidate the Earth structure underneath the volcano and searched for areas of partial melting. From this survey, it was found that the Mohorovi¿¿i¿¿ discontinuity (the crust-mantle boundary) was located at approximately sixty kilometers beneath the volcano, and that pockets of partial melting (i.e. magma) were found at approximately forty kilometers depth.