Understanding volcanic edifice erosion and morphologic evolution using numerical models

Volcanic edifices are dynamic landforms whose morphology encodes the long-term (thousands to millions of years) interplay between construction and erosion. Short-term, stochastic episodes of volcanic activity cumulatively build topography, competing with stochastic erosive processes associated with climate and mass wasting to degrade edifices over longer timescales, thus generating a variety of morphologies from simple, cone-like edifices to complex, non-axisymmetric volcanoes. Understanding how these processes interact to shape volcano morphologies over the landform’s lifespan is still in its infancy, especially as construction and erosion are often spatially-heterogeneous and temporally-varying. Despite this, disentangling edifice morphologic histories provide new avenues to better discern an edifice’s volcanic record, assess potential hazards, and quantify the role of climate in landscape evolution.

Numerical modeling has been shown to be a useful approach to exploring long-term landscape evolution. Although the majority of studies have applied landscape evolution models to tectonic settings, modeling has also been applied to simulate erosion and drainage development for specific volcanic features (e.g., channel incision on shield volcanoes, soil diffusion on cinder cones). However, thus far no modeling frameworks have been developed to explore evolution over the full spectrum of edifice types

Here, we investigate volcanic edifice erosion and drainage basin formation using a simplified landscape evolution model. Assuming that the various erosive processes that shape a volcano can be simplified to the competition between advection and diffusion, we use common transport laws (stream power law and linear soil diffusion) to conduct a nondimensional parameter analysis. We then test various parameter combinations to demonstrate the range of morphologic evolutions that can occur over different edifice classifications and environments. Afterwards, we compare our results to previously-derived relationships of natural volcano evolutions to test the ability for simplified models to recreate nature. Finally, we explore the effects of edifice size on the competition between incision- and diffusion-based erosion within the framework of our nondimensional parameters by quantifying drainage development of 156 cinder cones from the Springerville Volcanic Field (AZ, U.S.) and comparing these to both edifice age and planform area.

Our results demonstrate that simplified numerical models are able to recreate the trends observed in nature. Furthermore, we show that the combination of model parameters predicts threshold sizes that volcanic edifices must overcome to begin generating fluvial drainage networks and becoming incised by gullies, broadly inferring parametric thresholds that describe the ratios of erosion processes on these landforms. Our results thus establish a new foundation to study edifice morphologies over several volcano types (cinder cones, shield volcanoes, composite volcanoes) and construction styles (intrusion-driven surface uplift, mantling by lava flows and ash deposits), and provides a basis to test how volcanic environments respond to past and future changes in climate and tectonics.