Relationship between soil CO2 flux and volcanic tremor at Mt. Etna: Implications for magma dynamics

Large variations of the CO2 flux through the soil were observed between November 2002 and January 2006 at Mt. Etna volcano. In many cases, the CO2 flux was strongly influenced by changes in air temperature and atmospheric pressure. A new filtering method was then developed to remove the atmospheric influences on soil CO2 flux and, at the same time, to highlight the variations strictly related to volcanic activity. Successively, the CO2 corrected data were quantitatively compared with the spectral amplitude of the volcanic tremor by cross correlation function, cross-wavelet spectrum and wavelet coherence. These analyses suggested that the soil CO2 flux variations preceded those of volcanic tremor by about 50 days. Given that volcanic tremor is linked to the shallow (a few kilometer) magma dynamics and soil CO2 flux related to the deeper (~12 km b.s.l.) magma dynamics, the “delayed similarity” between the CO2 flux and the volcanic tremor amplitude was used to assess the average speed in the magma uprising into the crust, as about 170–260 m per day. Finally, the large amount of CO2 released before the onset of the 2004–2005 eruption indicated a deep ingression of new magma, which might have triggered such an eruption.