Stavros Meletlidis

Instituto Geográfico Nacional | IGN · Grupo de Volcanología

El Hierro, the youngest island of the Canary Islands, emerged from the ocean floor only 1.2 Ma ago and it is still in its youngest stage (shield volcanism). During its growth, the island passed from the submarine stage to the subaerial activity, constructing an island that had been modified by at least six large destructive flank collapses or giant...

Observational data recorded during the reawakening of volcanic activity in El Hierro, which ended with 2011–2012 Tagoro eruption, allow us to study the precursory activity associated with this event. This volcanic activity occurred between 1971 Teneguía eruption and the 2021 eruption in Cumbre Vieja (both in La Palma island) and represents the firs...

The geological survey has been carried out in El Hierro with the aim to produce a new Geological Map at 1:12,500 scale for the Southern Rift. Almost 70 km 2 have been mapped providing a detailed stratigraphic and volcano-tectonic reconstruction of its evolution. Our work focused on the last Rift Volcanism phase, where hundreds of cinder cones, asso...

Precise 3D dilatometric monitoring began on the San Andrés megalandslide detachment plane on El Hierro, Canary Islands, during the winter of 2013. It has been found that this presumably aborted giant landslide creeps progressively at rates of up to 0.5 mm a−1, with accelerations following periods of seismicity and extreme rainfall. In addition, a d...

Figure S1: Four examples of the H/V curves indicating prominent subsurface contrasts. The identified resonance frequencies are marked with gray solid lines and the values along with the location identifiers are in the titles; Figure S2: Photograph (c) shows an extraction of the rock sample of the porous basalt (for explanation see text); Figure S3:...

The San Andrés landslide on El Hierro (Canary Islands) represents a rare opportunity to study an incipient volcanic island flank collapse with an extensive onshore part. The presented research improves the knowledge of the internal structure and rock characteristics of a mega-landslide before its complete failure. The investigation combines multipl...

The 2021 volcanic eruption at La Palma, Canary Islands, was the island’s most voluminous historical eruption. Little is known about this volcano’s feeding system. During the eruption, seismicity was distributed in two clusters at ~10-14 km and ~33-39 km depth, separated by an aseismic zone. This gap coincides with the location of weak seismic swarm...

Volcanic hazard assessment relies on the accurate knowledge of the eruptive style and recurrence of volcanic eruptions in the past. At El Hierro (Canary Islands) historical and prehistorical records are still poorly defined, and although the island was the location of one of the most recent eruptions (La Restinga, 2011 CE) of the Canarian archipela...

The timing of Holocene volcanic activity of Tenerife (Canary Islands) is poorly constrained and despite the Teide-Pico Viejo (TVC) volcanic complex, which represents the last volcanic phase of the island, having been very intense, is still insufficiently investigated. Most of the recent eruptions are dated only by a single radiometric dating, or th...

Featured Application: Analysis of monitoring data from very slow-moving landslides. Abstract: This paper presents a methodological approach to the time-series analysis of movement monitoring data of a large slow-moving landslide. It combines different methods of data manipulation to decrease the subjectivity of a researcher and provides a fully qua...

We report on the Strombolian to Violent Strombolian eruption of Montaña Grande which occurred between 789 and 725 BCE in the Güimar Valley on the NE flank of Tenerife island. The eruption produced a ca. 180 m-high scoria cone, a thick fallout deposit mostly dispersed southwest and a vast lava flow field that extends east of the cone, towards the co...

The timing of the Holocene volcanic activity of Tenerife (Canary Islands) is poorly constrained and the volcanological framework for this area is still incomplete. Most of the eruptions are dated only by a single ¹⁴C dating, or the ages are simply stratigraphically determined. We apply palaeomagnetism, increasingly used in the last years to date Ho...

The timing of Holocene volcanic activity of Tenerife (Canary Islands) is poorly constrained and the volcanological framework for this area is still incomplete. Most of the eruptions are dated only by a single radiometric dating, or the ages are simply stratigraphically determined. We apply palaeomagnetism, increasingly used in the last years to dat...

Volcanic flank collapses often result in giant debris avalanches that are capable of travelling tens of kilometres across the ocean floor and generating tsunamis that devastate distant communities. The San Andrés Landslide on El Hierro, Canary Islands, represents one of the few places in the world where it is possible to investigate the landslide m...

Composite volcanic edifices are particularly prone to large-scale failures—these often result from the acceleration of preexisting deep-seated gravitational slope deformations. Consequently, a complete understanding of the kinematic behaviour of such slope deformations would represent an important step towards mitigating against human casualties or...

Report on the environmental monitoring (geophysics, seabed sampling, physical and chemical characteristics, and planton) made on the submarine volcano of Tagoro (El Hierro Islands) to evaluate the degree of affection and recovery on the marine ecosystem of the last volcanic eruption in the Canary region, making it extendable to other regions of the...

A small mesh of sensors which monitor movements across detachment planes of the giant San Andrés Landslide on the northeastern lobe of El Hierro in the Canary Islands was established in 2013. In this paper we present the results obtained over a two year period spanning from October 2013 to October 2015. Our results demonstrate that the detachment p...

The last eruption on Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) started on 18 November 1909 from the El Chinyero vent on the northwestern Santiago rift. This fissural eruption was well documented by scientists and eyewitnesses, but there is a lack of data on the high-energy phase that produced the most significant emissions of ash and lapilli at the onset of...

A shallow water eruption started on October 10, 2011, ~2 km south off the coast of El Hierro (Canary Islands, Spain). The eruption lasted about five months and ended by early March 2012. Three months of unrest preceded this event with more than 10,000 localized earthquakes and up to 6 cm of vertical ground deformation. In the Canary Islands, this i...

On 15 October 2011, a submarine eruption offshore of El Hierro Island gave rise to floating volcanic products, known as xenopumices, i.e., pumiceous xenoliths partly mingled and coated with the juvenile basanitic magma. Over the last few years, no consensus in the scientific community in explaining the origin of these products has been reached. In...

The Canary Islands consist of seven basaltic shield volcanoes whose submerged portion is much more volumi-nous than the subaerial part of each island. Like so many other volcanic oceanic islands, the indicative deposits of explosive felsic volcanism are not a common feature on the Canary archipelago. Hitherto, they have only been documented from th...

An extensive self-potential survey was carried out in the central volcanic complex of Tenerife Island (Canary Islands, Spain). A total amount of ~ 237 km of profiles with 20 m spacing between measurements was completed, including radial profiles extending from the summits of Teide and Pico Viejo, and circular profiles inside and around Las Cañadas...

A multidisciplinary approach has been applied in a study of eruptive fissures on the slopes of the main volcanic edifices in Tenerife. Our work concentrated on the youngest portion of these cones, including their ages and distribution. Detailed fieldwork was performed, producing a 1:5000-scale geological map of volcanic deposits and structural feat...

Determining the link between shallow structure and volcanism is a topic of interest in Volcanology. We carried out a geophysical study devoted to the characterization of the major structural limits influencing volcanic hydrothermal activity and underground meteoric circulations in La Palma (Canary Islands). Since 1 Ma volcanic activity concentrates...

1] Textures, petrography and geochemical compositions of products emitted during the onset of the 2011–2012 sub-marine eruption (15 October, 2011) off the coast of El Hierro have been investigated to get information on interaction mechanism between the first rising magma and the crust during the onset of the eruption as well as to get information o...

On 10 October 2011, a submarine volcanic eruption started 2 km south from El Hierro Island (Spain). Since July 2011 a dense multiparametric monitoring network was deployed all over the island by Instituto Geografico Nacional (IGN). By the time the eruption started, almost 10000 earthquakes had been located and the deformation analyses showed a maxi...

The Canarian Archipelago comprises seven major and three minor islands, all of them of volcanic origin. The distribution of the islands forms an east-west volcanic chain, starting about 90 km west of the northwest African continental margin. The canary volcanism is unique among ocean islands (long lifetime, multiple periods of volcanic activity, ex...

Since 17 July 2011 an important increase in the number of seismic events located in El Hierro (Canary Islands, Spain) was detected by the seismic network of the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (I.G.N.). This increment was interpreted as a precursory signal of a potential eruption, which in fact took place three months later (10th October 2011). In or...

An ex.tensive field study of various structural features (striated faults, joints, dykes and morphotectonic structures) on the Santorini (Thera) and Christiana island groups has been carried out in order to estimate the stress field that dominates the area. Since the majority of these features is located in recent volcanic products, this stress fie...