The role of sedimentology in the mobility of debris avalanches: Evidence from their deposits and granular flow experiments

Debris avalanches and lahars are among the most destructive and hazardous mass flows in volcanic environments making them important to understand from a hazard assessment perspective. Sedimentological characteristics of their deposits are important for assessing their propagation and emplacement mechanisms. Here, we compare the sedimentology of nine volcanic debris avalanches and eight lahars, by the descriptive statistics: median grain size, sand, gravel and finer particle proportion, skewness, and sorting.

Results suggest that lahars and debris avalanches diverge in their grain size distribution evolution during propagation, even when sourced from the same material. Increasing bimodality, evolution to negative skewness, with decreasing sediment size, accompanied by very poor sorting suggest comminution of particles due to particle-particle interactions in debris avalanches. Instead, preferential deposition of the coarsest particles and improved sorting suggest that the decrease in grain size of lahars is the result of debulking. The divergence is mainly caused by the high water content in lahars, which introduce different processes during propagation. This suggests, in agreement with previous studies, that debris avalanches can be considered as dense granular flows where the effect of inertial collisions of solid fragments are more important than fluid effects.

Present findings and previous sedimentological studies suggest that both volcanic and non-volcanic debris avalanches exhibit bimodal grain-size distributions, at least locally, in areas of high shear accommodation. Following these results, an experimental campaign has been carried out to test the effect of bimodality on the propagation of granular flows. These experiments are flows of bidisperse granular material on an initial inclined plane, with a horizontal accumulation surface at the bottom.  Findings confirm that the bimodality of the grain size distribution generates a more efficient shearing arrangement, which can increase the mobility of granular flows in the same way recorded in debris avalanche deposits.