Precursory characteristics of the seismicity before the 6 August 2012 eruption of Tongariro volcano, North Island, New Zealand

The 6 August 2012 eruption from the Upper Te Maari crater of Tongariro volcano followed approximately three weeks of precursory seismic activity. Earthquake relocations including data from extra temporary stations indicated that nearly all events were in a small area very close to Upper Te Maari. Most of these relocated events were very shallow, with nearly all events being between 1000 and 1500 m below the ground surface. e-eruption seismicity occurred in three main swarms. During the first swarm on 12–13 July 2012, all the earthquakes had consistent inter-event times of 71 ± 8 min, while in the later swarms (17–20 and 29–30 July) many events had a similar pattern of consistent inter-event times. The stationary quasi-periodic (“clockwork”) earthquake process suggests that a single fracture point was excited by a nearly constant rate flux process. minant type of earthquake observed in these swarms had a sharp onset and a broad spectrum, with strong energy from 2 to 10 Hz. Most events seen had a local magnitude of 1.5 to 2.5, with virtually no smaller events. Most of these earthquakes appeared to belong to a main earthquake family whose characteristics included a strong spectral component at about 2 Hz and three bursts of energy spaced at intervals of about 1.5 s. Of the 116 located earthquakes, 75 had a correlation coefficient greater than 0.70 with a master event. The spectra of these events did not change with size, with matching frequency peaks for all the events with a high correlation. The last event of this type was the day before the 6 August 2012 eruption, none have been seen since and there has been very little seismicity under Tongariro. eismicity alerted GNS Science and other organisations to the unrest of Tongariro, and the Volcanic Alert Level and Aviation Colour Code were raised to publicise this. GNS Science also increased its monitoring of Tongariro, and discovered that the magmatic gas concentrations had increased compared to previous measurements in May 2012. However, the seismicity did not show any accelerating trend that suggested an immediate eruption threat, indicating the difficulty of predicting small eruptions in Tongariro and similar volcanoes.