Evidence for high fluid/melt content beneath Krakatau volcano (Indonesia) from local earthquake tomography

Within the KRAKMON project for multiparameter monitoring of Anak Krakatau volcano (Indonesia), a network of temporary stations was installed on the islands of the Krakatau complex as well as in the surrounding areas of the Sunda Strait, Sumatra and Java. The network was operated from June 2005 until January 2006. More than 700 local events were recorded during this experiment, and travel times from these events were used to perform a tomographic inversion for P and S velocities and for the Vp/Vs ratio. In this study, special attention was paid to the validation of the computed model based on different tests, such as inversion of independent data subsets and synthetic modeling. Although the network configuration and the distribution of the events are not favorable for high-quality tomographic imaging, we have obtained some important and robust features which give information about sources of volcanic activity in the Krakatau complex. The most interesting feature of this study is a zone of high Vp/Vs ratio beneath the Krakatau complex. At depths down to 4 km depth we observe anticorrelation of higher P- and lower S-velocities that leads to Vp/Vs ratio higher than 2. This is a probable indicator of the presence of partially molten and/or with high fluid content material with a composition corresponding to deeper layers. It is important that the anomaly of high Vp/Vs ratio beneath the Krakatau complex appears to be separated in two parts at a depth of 5–6 km. This fits to results of geobarometric analysis that presume the existence of several levels of magma chambers beneath Anak Krakatau.

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► The distribution of P and S velocity anomalies beneath Krakatau volcano is derived from local earthquake tomography.
► Beneath volcanic complex we observe high Vp/Vs ratio (up to 2.2) which is probably related to high fluid/melt content.
► Our results show an existence of multiple magma storage regions beneath volcano, which fits with geobarometric analysis data.