Does Thermal Granulation Drive Tephra Jets?

Surtseyan tephra jets, also called cypressoid or cock's tail plumes, comprise a characteristic mixture of ash with bombs travelling roughly ballistic paths that tip the individual fingers of the projecting jet. Jets of similar form but smaller scale are generated by littoral magma-water interactions, confirming the general inference that surtseyan tephra jets are a characteristic product of explosive magma-water interaction, and suggesting that magmatic volatiles play a subsidiary role, if any, in their formation. Surtseyan jets have been inferred to result from both intense fuel-coolant interactions, and from simple boiling of water entrained into rising magma, and little new information has become available to test these two positions since they were clearly developed in the 1980s. Recent experiments in which magma is poured into standing water have produced vigorous jetting of hot water as melt solidifies and undergoes extensive thermal granulation. We present high-resolution hi-speed video of these jets, which we see as having the following origin. As thermal granulation takes place, a fracture network advances into the melt/glass body, and water invading the cracks at the rate of propagation is heated nearly instantaneously. Vapor produced at the contact expands and drives outward through cooled cracks, condensing as it moves to the exterior of the magma body where it is emitted as a jet of hot water. In ocean ridge hydrothermal systems a diffuse crack network inducts cold water, which is heated and expelled in focused jets. Focusing of hot outflow in experiments is inferred to result, as suggested for ridge hydrothermal systems, from thermoelastic closure of cracks near the one(s) feeding the jet. From the cooled products of our experimental runs, we know that thermal contraction produces a network of curved cracks with modal spacing of 1-2 mm, which separate domains of unbroken glass. It is during growth of this crack network that cold water enters, is vaporized, recondensed and driven out through other cracks as a hot-water jet. At larger scales, we suggest that intense jets of this sort may trigger explosive MFCI capable of driving vigorous tephra jets in littoral interactions and surtseyan eruptions.