CYCLIC FORMATION OF DEBRIS AVALANCHES AT MOUNT-ST-AUGUSTINE VOLCANO

VOLCANIC debris avalanches have been seen at many volcanoes since the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, but typically only one or two avalanche deposits are identified at each eruptive centre, suggesting that catastrophic slope failures are rare or even unique events in the lifetime of a volcano 1-4. Here we present a series of radiocarbon dates from volcanic deposits showing that the summit edifice of Mount St Augustine, a 1,220-m-high active volcano on Augustine Island in the Cook Inlet area of south-central Alaska, has repeatedly collapsed and regenerated, averaging 150-200 years per cycle, during the past 2,000 years. The unprecedented frequency of summit edifice failure was made possible by sustained lava effusion rates over 10 times greater than is typical of plate-margin volcanoes.