In situ thermal characterization of cooling/crystallizing lavas during rheology measurements and implications for lava flow emplacement

Abstract Transport properties of natural silicate melts at super-liquidus temperatures are reasonably well understood. However, migration and transport of silicate melts in the Earth’s crust and at its surface generally occur at sub-liquidus temperatures and in settings where the melts undergo crystallization under various cooling and/or decompression conditions. In such dynamic situations the occurrence of processes such as the release of latent heat during phase changes, viscous heating, thermal advection and -inertia, and changing heat capacity, all represent potential influences on the state, and thereby on the physico-chemical behavior of the system. To date, rheological data at sub-liquidus temperatures are scarce and cooling-rate dependent, disequilibrium rheological data are virtually absent. In fact, no in situ thermal characterization of liquid or multiphase mixtures during rheological experiments, under either static or dynamic thermal conditions has been presented to date. Here we describe a new experimental setup for in situ thermal characterization of cooling/crystallizing lavas during viscosity measurement at temperatures up to 1600 °C. We use this device to recover in situ, real-time, observations of the combined rheological and thermal evolution of natural, re-melted lava samples during the transient disequilibrium conditions characteristic of lava flows and shallow crustal magma migration and storage systems in nature. We present the calibration procedure and the method employed to recover the thermal evolution of an experimental sample during flow in varying shear regimes, assess the experimental uncertainty and show the ability of the apparatus to measure the release of latent heat of crystallization during transient rheological experiments. We further report the results from a first experimental study on the rheological and thermal evolution of a basaltic lava undergoing continuous cooling at a series of different cooling rates and discuss the implications of the results for magma migration and lava flow emplacement.