Lithospheric Sill Intrusions and Present‐Day Ground Deformation at Rhenish Massif, Central Europe

Abstract

The Rhenish Massif in Central Europe, which includes the Eifel Volcanic Fields, has shown ongoing ground deformation and signs of possible unrest. A buoyant plume exerting uplift forces at the bottom of the lithosphere was proposed to explain such deformation; the hypothesis of (possibly concurrent) melt accumulation in the crust/lithospheric mantle has not been explored yet. Here, we test deformation models in an elastic half‐space considering sources of varying aspect ratio, size and depth. We explore the effects of data coverage, noise and uncertainty on the inferred source parameters. We find that the observed deformation would require melt accumulation in sub‐horizontal sill‐like structures expanding at the rate of up to ∼0.045 km3/yr. We discuss feasibility, limitations and possible interpretations of our resulting models and elaborate on further observations which may help constrain the structure of the Rhenish Massif magmatic system.

Open Access GNSS Data for Studies of the Lithosphere

“…However, quantifying intraplate deformation is challenging since strain rates are a spatial derivative; thus, any outlier velocities within a dense network can easily be mapped into a local strain rate anomaly. When successful, intraplate strain rate patterns can reveal and constrain, in conjunction with the measured vertical land motions, GIA deformation (e.g., Keiding et al, 2015;Kreemer et al, 2018), the effects of a buoyant mantle plume (Kreemer et al, 2020), or a large-scale sill intrusion (Silverii et al, 2023).…”

The Dynamic Crust of Northern Afar and Adjacent Rift Margins: New Evidence From Receiver Function Analysis in Eritrea and Ethiopia

“…Ground deformation observed at the Rhenish Massif in Central Europe has been explained as melt accumulation in sub-horizontal sill-like structures (Silverii et al, 2023). A seismic reflection study of the Juan de Fuca Ridge concludes that sub-horizontal stacked magma lenses are present in multiple locations beneath the ridge, providing sources for eruption events (Carbotte et al, 2021).…”