Spatio-temporal forecasting of future volcanism at Harrat Khaybar, Saudi Arabia release_eawk3azcn5cbho6xysy54r6pty

by Abdullah Alohali, Daniel Bertin, Shanaka de Silva, Shane Cronin, Robert Duncan, Saleh Qaysi, Mohammed R. Moufti

Published in Journal of Applied Volcanology by Springer Science and Business Media LLC.

2022   Volume 11

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>The 180,000 km<jats:sup>2</jats:sup> of Arabian lava fields ("harrats" in Arabic) form one of the largest distributed basaltic provinces in the world. The most recent eruption in 1256 AD, on the outskirts of Medina, as well as shallow dike emplacement in 2009, ~ 200 km northeast of the city, suggest future volcanic threat to this area. Harrat Khaybar (~ 1.7 Ma to present) is one of the largest and most compositionally diverse Arabian lava fields; it is located ~ 137 km northeast of Medina and covers ~ 14,000 km<jats:sup>2</jats:sup>. Here, we present a new eruption event record and the first estimation of future potential locations and timing of volcanism in Harrat Khaybar. Volcanic vents and eruptive fissures were mapped using remote sensing and field studies, and categorized into a geospatial database, complemented by 16 new <jats:sup>40</jats:sup>Ar/<jats:sup>39</jats:sup>Ar ages. Our analysis reveals that Harrat Khaybar developed over five eruptive phases, where vent locations over time focus towards the central axis forming a broad N-S trend, with a central group concentrated along an axis of the regional Makkah-Madinah-Nafud (MMN) line and wider spatial dispersion between vents outwards from there. For the whole field, we estimate a long-term average recurrence rate of ~ 2.3 eruptions per 10 kyr assuming a Poisson distribution for inter-event times, which indicates that Harrat Khaybar would belong to a global group of highly active distributed volcanic fields. Our analysis also reveals that the field likely had a "flare-up" period between 450 and 300 ka where the vast majority of eruptions occurred, with ~ 18 eruptions per 10 kyr. After this intense period, eruption rates fell to &lt; 2 eruptions per 10 kyr. Based on our findings, we estimate cumulative probabilities of 1.09 and 16.3% as lower and upper bounds of at least one eruption occurring over the next 100 years somewhere in Harrat Khaybar, with the highest probabilities within the central axis region, in particular around Jabal Qidr, Bayda and Abyad.
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