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Worldwide Database of Volcanic Ground Deformation

Erta Ale

Volcano number: 221080
Region: Africa and Red Sea
Country: Ethiopia
Geodetic measurements? Yes
Deformation observation? No
Measurement method(s): InSAR
Duration of observation:
Inferred cause of deformation: []
Characteristics of deformation:

Erta Ale is a basaltic shield volcano in the Erta Ale Range, northern Ethiopia, 600 m sea level. The volcano contains a 0.7 x 1.6 km, elliptical summit crater and another 1.8 x 3.1 km wide depression elongated parallel to the trend of the Erta Ale range is located to the SE of the summit. Fresh-looking basaltic lava flows from these fissures have poured into the caldera and locally overflowed its rim. Erta Ale houses a persistent lava lake in one, sometimes both, of its summit crater.
Pagli, et al. (2014), for the purposes of investigating regional velocity fields, has looked at Envisat InSAR data (2005 – 2010) covering this volcano. They report no deformation.
Erta Ale erupted in January 2017 and lava flows were still active in August 2019 (Moore et al. 2019). Moore et al., (2019) used InSAR data to measure ground displacement from October 2014 to June 2019 and used coherence data to map the lava flows. Xu et al. (2020) also used InSAR data to identify volcano-wide subsidence of up to 9 cm and horizontal contraction of up to ~5 cm

References: Pagli, C. et al., 2014. Current plate boundary deformation of the Afar rift from a 3-D velocity field inversion of InSAR and GPS. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 119(11), pp. 8562-8575.\\\', http://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=221080]
Moore, C. Wright, T. Hooper, A. and Biggs, J. 2019. The 2017 Eruption of Erta Ale Volcano, Ethiopia: Insights Into the Shallow Axial Plumbing System of an Incipient Mid-Ocean Ridge. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. 20(12), pp.5727-5743.
Xu, W. Xie, L. Aoki, Y. Rivalta, E. and Jónsson, S. 2020. Volcano-Wide Deformation After the 2017 Erta Ale Dike Intrusion, Ethiopia, Observed With Radar Interferometry. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. 125(8).
Location: 40.67, 13.6