The Galápagos Islands seen from space: the contribution of Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) to volcano monitoring

Although the Galápagos volcanoes are some of the most active volcanoes on Earth, because of their geographic isolation and the difficult working conditions they have been virtually unmonitored by geodetic methods until the last 18 years. The use of detailed Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) measurements of the surface deformation provides a unique opportunity to study magmatic processes in such a location. The phase difference (interferogram) of SAR images pairs for the same area acquired at different times, provides measurements of the ground deformation along the radar line-of-sight (LOS) with centimeter to millimeter accuracy. We use SAR data acquired over the Galápagos by the European Space Agency satellites ERS-1, ERS-2, ENVISAT and by the Canadian Space Agency satellite Radarsat-1, between 1992 and 2010. In order to obtain the temporal evolution of ground deformation at each volcano, we use the selected dataset and we apply the Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) method. We present SBAS displacement time-series for Wolf, Darwin, Fernandina, Alcedo, Sierra Negra and Cerro Azul, showing that all the six volcanoes that forms Fernandina and Isabela Islands have been actively deforming during the last eighteen years. We also identify and constrain some of the sources that generate the observed surface deformation by performing non-linear inversions in a homogeneous, isotropic, elastic half-space. With the frequent acquisitions of the ENVISAT satellite, we are able to study the evolution of the latest eruptions at Cerro Azul in 2008 and at Fernandina in 2009.