The Curious Case of Reiden Patera

Meet Reiden Patera. On the surface, it is an ordinary volcanic pit on Io. But in reality, it is anything but ordinary. Every few years, this particular volcano becomes just another part... of the Twilight Zone.

Okay, I am not Rod Sterling. However, today I thought I would write a little post on this curious volcano. Actually, it is quite ordinary. Our best resolution images are at only 1.5 km/pixel. It has never been the site of an outburst. However this volcano in the shadow of Pillan has gone through an interesting cycle of activity since the feature was first observed by Voyager 1 in 1979.

Reiden Patera is a 73-km wide volcanic depression located on Io's trailing hemisphere a couple hundred kilometers to the southwest of Pillan Patera. Reiden's proximity to Pillan causes occasional confusion between the two features when trying to identify the source of thermal emission in eclipse and near-infrared images of this region of Io. Reiden generally has a dark green floor with dark spots scattered around the margin of the patera. Surrounding the patera, there is normally a bright annulus, which is then surrounded by a dark annulus. The closest analog seen at high resolution by Galileo would be Camaxtli Patera, a similar-sized volcano on Io's anti-Jupiter hemisphere. Like Reiden, Camaxtli has a floor with a patchwork of bright deposits and dark lava flows, and has concentric bright and dark halos surrounding the depression. Reiden, like Camaxtli, has a roughly polygonal outline, with several straight margins, suggestive of structural control, by pre-existing tectonic faults, of the patera margin. A possible landslide deposit can be seen along Reiden's northern margin.

As you can see in the above montage, the appearance of Reiden changed during the course of the Galileo mission. During the first few orbits, several dark spots were seen along the margin, some appearing over time. This suggested on-going volcanic activity centered on the patera margin, and this is substantiated in the thermal data acquired by NIMS and SSI. The camera onboard Galileo, SSI, detected a hotspot at Reiden during the mission's first orbit in late June 1996 (G1). NIMS, the near-infrared spectrometer on Galileo, may have detected a hotspot at Reiden during the second and third orbits (early-September and early-November 1996, respectively), though Lopes et al. 1997 attributes the observed thermal emission to Pillan instead. Changes observed in images acquired in February 1997 (E6) suggests that Reiden was active until shortly after the November 1996, but SSI did show that Reiden had decreased in activity by E6 (in fact, Reiden was not visible in SSI eclipse observations like it was in G1). The lack of changes in images acquired in April 1997 (G7) provides further evidence that the eruption at Reiden had ended. By the next orbit, the outburst eruption at nearby Pillan had begun.

Over the next few years, Reiden remained an inactive volcano, and the dark lava flows seen along its margins began to turn from black to dark green. In images acquired in September 1997 (C10), even the dark halo surrounding Reiden was gone, but the inner, bright halo remained. How much topography and the nearby Pillan eruption played in this change isn't clear, but it appears that Reiden's bright halo maybe located on a low, topographic rise that surrounds Reiden as it was not covered by Pillan's pyroclastic deposits and the topographic rise acted as an impedment to the pyroclastic flow. This provides further evidence that Io's dark silicate deposits, associated with some volcanoes like Pillan, Tvashtar, Pele, and Babbar, are deposited in a process akin to terrestrial basal surges compared to the umbrella-like gas plumes Io is so famous for. As Pillan's dark deposit faded in 1998 and 1999, the dark halo seen when Reiden was active remained absent.

Reiden reactivated by late 2000 as it was seen as a hotspot by Cassini ISS during that spacecraft's distant flyby on December 30, 2000. Galileo during this time observed a darkening at Reiden, further suggesting that activity had resumed. In addition, Galileo observed fresh reddish deposits to the east and northwest of Reiden, perhaps from this new eruption. During a flyby in October 2001 (I32), Reiden was seen at higher resolution. This observation revealed fresh dark material (compared to comparable data acquired in October 1999) along most of its margin, except to the north (where there is a landslide). Reiden may have reactivated as early as October 1999 (I24), when two dark spots were observed along the margin of the patera, near its southwestern margin and along the southern part of the landslide deposit.

Reiden was also seen as active by New Horizons in LORRI imager data and was seen as a dark feature with a bright halo. During the Voyager flybys, it appeared similar to its appearance during the first few orbits of the Galileo mission, though with a dark spot along its northeastern margin, suggesting that Reiden was active during the Voyager mission.

Reiden, though named after the Japanese god of thunder (or was it the Mortal Kombat character...), has long been in the shadow of more famous volcanoes like Pillan and Pele, volcanoes that occasional affect the appearance of Reiden and its surrounding terrain. However, the history of activity at Reiden is an interesting one, where several distinct eruption cycles have been observed by multiple spacecraft. All of Reiden's activity has been confined to small effusive eruptions along the depression's margins. This would suggest that perhaps Reiden is a large lava lake, but there is no evidence of a massive crustal recycling event like those seen at Loki, a more classic example of a lava lake on Io. It is possible that magma uses the faults that bound the depression as conduits to reach the surface, explaining why flows are confined to the margins of the patera. However, a passive lava lake would explain the small eruption along the southern margin of the landslide deposit seen during C3 and I24, as the margin of the landslide would likely not be structurally controlled. It is also possible that this northern bright area is not a landslide, but a cool "island", similar to those seen at Loki and Tupan, two volcanoes thought to be lava lakes.

Hope you all enjoyed this look at Reiden Patera. I hope to post similar articles about other "forgotten" volcanoes here in the future.

Io DPS Talks

The Galilean Satellites session at the DPS meeting was held this morning in Ithaca, New York. The talks were also online as a webcast, allowing me to view (and all of you) to view the talks despite not being at the conference. The talks mostly focused on the icy satellites of Jupiter, particularly Europa and Ganymede, but two talks covered Io specifically. The first was given by Julie Rathbun (with co-author John Spencer) and was titled, "Loki, Io: Fitting a lava lake model to Eclipse Observations" (link takes you the abstract). The second was given by Nick Schneider (with coauthors C. Grava and C. Barbieri) and was titled, "Unusual Velocity Structures of Neutral Sodium Near Io's Wake."

Rathbun presented ground-based data of Io at multiple wavelengths in the near-infrared portion of the spectrum. This was done to see if the lava lake crust floundering model for Loki's eruption behavior was supported using multi-wavelength observations.

Ground-based observers have been monitoring activity at Loki Patera, the largest volcanic depression on Io, since 1988. This observation campaign has revealed that Loki goes through a cycle of activity, with periods of high-thermal emission (also called brightenings) and low emission. The Rathbun model suggests that this cycle is related to the style of activity at Loki. She (and her co-authors) propose that Loki Patera is a large lava lake, a depression filled with molten lava and covered by a thin crust of porous, solidified lava. Over time, this crust thickens to the point where the crust starts to collapse. This collapse occurs as a wave, moving from the southwest margin of the patera then counter-clockwise around the interior "island" to the northwest margin. A new thin crust forms behind this collapse wave, and is allowed to thicken until it is no longer bouyant over the molten lava below.

To test to see if this model is supported at multiple wavelengths, Rathbun examined disk-resolved Io images taken at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) at 2.26 μm and 4.78 μm (similar to the image at right), to go along with the 3.5 μm observations used to develop their lava lake model. Using the model, which takes into account the average duration of a brightening event and the average peak 3.5 μm brightness during these events, they can predict the brightness of Loki at the other two wavelengths and the amount of power output in Gigawatts per micron per steradian. For the 3.5 μm observations, Rathbun and Spencer used occultation light curves, disk-integrated measurements of Io's brightness as it either leaves or enters Jupiter's shadow. Knowing the position of Io and the timing of these measurements, the authors can extract a position for any thermal emission source seen in the lightcurves.

For the disk-resolved images at the other two wavelengths, Rathbun and Spencer had to subtract the contribution from the other volcanoes on the sub-Jovian hemisphere to obtain an estimate for the brightness of Loki. Rathbun accomplished this by comparing global brightness measurements derived from the IRTF images between periods when Loki was active and when it was inactive. By subtracting the average global brightness between those two periods, she could get an estimate of Loki's average brightness during a brightening at 2.26 μm and 4.78 μm. The estimates had pretty large error bars, but the estimates seem to fit the predicted values from her lava lake model. This technique was also performed with IRTF observations at 3.5 μm, and they fit the occultation light curve measurements.

Rathbun and Spencer plan to compare the 2.26 μm estimates to a couple of lightcurve measurements at 2.2 μm accomplished during the Galileo mission. They also plan to look at the individual observations from the Galileo era when they had great temporal resolution.

The other talk, by Nick Schnieder, covered "Unusual Velocity Structures near Io's Wake." Io's atmosphere (and ultimately its volcanoes) supplies material for various structures in Jupiter's magnetosphere. Schneider used a spectrograph at the Telescopio Nationale Galileo in the Canary Islands to observe the various escape features for sodium in the banana-shaped neutral cloud that surrounds Io as Io went into and out of Jupiter's shadow. These include streams of fast moving sodium atoms from the neutral cloud and jets of sodium from Io's ionosphere. Schneider's observations revealed an additional escape mechanism. In this case, sodium jets away from Io toward Jupiter at only 15 km/sec. This suggests the sodium originates on the Jupiter-facing hemisphere and is perhaps limited to the leading hemisphere. How these jets are generated has not been determined. However, this new sodium features may provide a new way to study Io's volcanism, atmosphere, and plasma environment from Earth.

That finishes up the Io talks for DPS. Hopefully, AGU and next LPSC will provide more geology ;)

LPSC 2008: Validation of Volcanic Thermal Emission Models

JPL's Ashley Davies has published several papers over the last 11 years presenting his cooling model for terrestrial and ionian lava flows. I know this is a gross over-simplification (I'm sorry, Ashley) but basically the model inputs the near-infrared thermal spectrum of a hotspot and some appropriate physical parameters (initial eruption temperature, flow thickness, porosity, etc.), and outputs flow age, area, temperature, and flow rate (note to self: apparently I don't have his 1996 paper from Icarus on my laptop). The model has also been used to investigate eruption styles at different Ionian volcanoes.

This abstract by Davies and a cast of several covers a test on the model to see how well it reproduces the near-infrared spectrum of a lava lake on Mount Erebus on Ross Island, Antarctica. The test was needed in order to see how close to reality the model is when dealing with volcanoes on Io where we can't (at the moment) just go out and more directly measure the composition, temperature, and flow rate.

The authors imaged the Erebus lava lake (shown above) using an infrared camera and derived an integrated thermal spectrum from that data. The authors compare the model fits obtained from both one- and two-temperature fits to the Erebus data, similar to those performed by other groups on Galileo NIMS data, and from the Davies (1996) model. While the two-temperature fit modeled the lava lake well with respect to areal extent, the Davies (1996) model appears fairly robust when modeling the Erebus lava lake. One issue they do note is that in order to obtain this match, they used an eruption temperature that was 175 K warmer than what it actually is at Erebus. The authors promise further investigation on this issue and how it might affect the parameters they use for modeling Ionian lava lakes (since obviously eruption temperature is poorly constrained on Io).

Link: Validation of Volcanic Thermal Emission Models Using Ground-Truthed Data of the Erebus volcano (Antarctica) Lava Lake: Implications for Io [www.lpi.usra.edu]

Lava lakes on Io: New perspectives from modeling

Tracy Gregg and Rosaly Lopes have a new paper in the March issue of Icarus titled, "Lava lakes on Io: New perspectives from modeling." The paper provides a possible model for the volcanism observed at Loki Patera (shown at left from images taken by Galileo's SSI and NIMS instruments). Previous models by Davies et al. and Rathbun et al. suggested that the episodic activity was the result of lava flows spreading out from a fissure and an overturning lava lake, respectively. The lava lake hypothesis has gained particular currency among the Iophile community over the last few years, particularly its ability to explain the distribution of thermal sources as seen by NIMS.

Gregg and Lopes, in their paper, point out a few problems with both models. In the first, wherein lava flows spread out from a fissure, the lack of overflowing lava despite repeated eruption episodes over the last 20 years is a concern. In the second, the difference in scale between terrestrial lava lakes (most are on the order of 100 meters across) and Loki (approximately 200 km across) is an issue. The authors point out several other issues, including the scale of magma reservoir needed and the thermally patchy nature of the patera floor.

The authors instead propose the following model for Loki Patera: 1) Magma is fed into a thin (10s-100s meters thick) chamber from a tidally heated source deep beneath Loki; 2) When this chamber is filled, magma travels up a conduit a few km long (assuming relatively low surface porosity) and into a fissure along the southwestern margin of the patera; 3) The lava then flows out from the fissure into pre-existing lava tubes or covered-over lava channels, travelling out from the fissure across the rest of the patera; 4) The lava ends up being intruded into the country rock of the patera floor (rather than flowing along the surface as lava flows) or fills lava ponds along the patera margin; 5) The eruption episode ends when the magma chamber is emptied and the lava in the fissure trench drains back down. The authors suggest that the eruption style at Loki is roughly analogous to eruptions along the East Pacific Rise.

This model is consistent with observations obtained of Loki. The thermal wave seen by ground-based observers and NIMS would be produced by heat conducted up from the lava tubes to the patera floor. The hotspot along the southeastern margin of the patera represents the location of the fissure. The other hotspots along the patera margin and along the margin of the "island" on the floor of Loki likely represent lava ponds where lava has collected at a topographic obstacle. The corresponding darkening wave at visible wavelengths seen along the patera floor by Voyager 1 and 2, rather than being the result of lava flowing across the surface or new crust in an overturning lava lake, is the result of volatiles being driven off a surface that is heated from below by lava flowing through lava tubes.

This is certainly a very interesting model for Loki as it explains the lower temperature measured by NIMS and PPR compared to eruptions at other volcanoes on Io and the lack of lava overflowing the patera margin. I think the lava lake model works best for smaller volcanoes like Pele and the southeastern portion of Gish Bar Patera, where the difference in size between terrestrial and Ionian lava lakes wouldn't be so great. It would be interesting to see how well this model might work for other inter-patera flows, like the main floor of Gish Bar or Emakong Patera.

Link: Lava lakes on Io: New perspectives from modeling [dx.doi.org]