Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 201 (2011) v–viii

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Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research

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Editorial

Maars and scoria cones: the enigma of monogenetic volcanic fields

This Special Volume on Maars and Scoria Cones emerged fromtwo international conferences held in 2009. The Third InternationalMaar Conference (3IMC) in Malargüe, Argentina, in April 2009 (ca. 80attendants, see also – Report of the IAVCEI – IAS 3rd International MaarConference, Malargüe, Argentina, 14–17 April 2009, in IAVCEI NEWS2009 No. 1, p. 4–7.) included the initiative to arrange a special volumein a technical journal similarly to the JVGR Special Volume publishedyears earlier on Maar–Diatreme volcanism in 2007 from researchoutputs presented during the Second International Maar Conference inLajosmizse, Hungary in April 2004. During the preparation of the bidto make arrangements for the publication of the present volume witha technical journal, a conference was held in Morelia, Mexico in lateSeptember–early October, 2009 on the occasion of the 250thanniversary of the Jorullo scoria cone eruption (see also Jorullo250th anniversary workshop — Monogenetic volcanism in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt and elsewhere: A multidisciplinary internationalvolcanological congress to commemorate the 250th anniversary ofVolcán Jorullo's birth in Michoacán, México. IAVCEI News 2010 No. 1,p. 3–5.). The Jorullo conference was too, a well-attended meeting (ca.100 participants) where it became obvious, that current volcanolog-ical research is becoming focused on better understanding otheraspects of monogenetic volcanism (not only maars, but also scoriacones and the volcanic fields in which both occur). In this regard,during the Jorullo conference, the idea to combine the two conferences'potential outputs into one single volume emerged. Also, during theJorullo conference, it was decided that the next Fourth InternationalMaar Conference proposed to be held in Auckland, New Zealand in20–25, February 2012, should include scoria cones (which are muchmore common than maars) as a conference topic and cover all aspectsassociated to monogenetic volcanism including petrology, sedimen-tology, geomorphology, climate and environmental studies, etc.

The Jorullo conference was also the place to continue workingtoward the establishment of a fully functional commission under theumbrella of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistryof the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI): a new “Commission on MonogeneticVolcanism” (co-lead by Károly Németh, Massey University; AdrianPittari, Waikato University; and Ian E.M. Smith, Auckland University,all in New Zealand) had been proposed earlier during the 3IMC inArgentina, and shortly after been approved by the IAVCEI executivecommittee. This new commission aims to provide an avenue insideIAVCEI to promote and facilitate research relevant to all aspects ofmonogenetic volcanism. One of the initial activities of the commissionwas to arrange a special volume onmonogenetic volcanism in a highlyregarded technical journal, such as JVGR, collecting research papersfrom contributions presented during the 3IMC. During the Jorulloconference, however, it became evident that a special volume whichwould combine papers derived from both, the 3IMC and Jorullo

0377-0273/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2011.03.001

conferences, would serve far better the goal of the newly establishedIAVCEI commission. As a result, a joint proposal was presented toJVGR. Prof JoanMartí, the current Secretary General of IAVCEI and oneof the editors of JVGR, provided crucial support for the consolidationof this effort.

The present special volume onmaars and scoria cones is one of thefirst achievements of IAVCEI's Commission on Monogenetic Volcanism(CMV) in which the primary aim of linking different scientific sub-disciplines (e.g. petrology, geochemsitry, vent-distribution studies,probabilistic volcanic hazard studies, erosion process studies, sedi-mentology, stratigraphy, palynology, palaeontology, geophysicalstudies, palaeoclimatology, etc.) through research on monogeneticvolcanoes has become a reality. The “bonding nature” of monogeneticvolcanism as a research subject capable of bringing together diversescientists from different disciplines has become evident.

Maars and scoria cones are the most obvious manifestation ofmonogenetic volcanism in any geotectonic and environmental setting.They are generally the product of short-lived eruptions and fre-quently reflect the role of external factors acting on rising magmawhen it approaches the land's surface, and in certain cases promotingits explosive eruption. Maars can be envisaged as the wet equivalentsof scoria cones implying that their eruption mechanism is stronglyinfluenced by external environmental circumstances such as theavailability of ground and/or surface water during the eruption ofsmall-volume magmas. Comparing these volcanoes by viewing themside by side is helpful in order to distinguish the internal versusexternal factors forcing the various eruption styles of such short-livedsmall-volume monogenetic volcanoes. This is well-reflected in thediversity of topics addressed in the papers that constitute the presentvolume.

A continuously growing body of evidence has been accumulatingwhich indicates that the final result of monogenetic volcanism(either a maar or a scoria cone), especially in the case of eruptingmafic magmas, will strongly reflect the relative roles of these internaland external parameters. Changes in these parameters will causechanges in the eruption style that can be quite abrupt and reverseseveral times during the course of such a generally short-livedvolcano. A similar concept can help to understand the long-term evo-lution of a volcanic field, where internal parameters (magma produc-tion rate; tectonic regime, etc.) and external parameters (e.g. climateand related level of the ground water table) can vary over tens ofthousands of years, leading to the formation of various individualvolcanoes whose morphologies and other characteristics (e.g. faciesarchitecture and sedimentary features) document these changes of theexternal parameters in the sedimentary record.

The present Special Volume provides a snapshot of relevantresearch on maars and scoria cones that is currently being carried out

Fig. 1. Increasing trend in the number of published items relevant to monogenetic volcanism (data from Scopus).

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in several regions around the globe. In an historic context, studieson monogenetic volcanoes were promoted largely in preparation forthe NASA lunar programme in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Theseresearch projects were initially focused on morphological aspects ofmonogenetic volcanic landforms and their differences with craters ofother origin (e.g. eruptive versus erosion processes, meteoriteimpacts scars, etc.) and aimed to help in the identification of anal-ogous landforms (e.g. crater morphologies) displayed on images ofthe surface of extraterrestrial bodies (e.g. the Moon) that were beingproduced with the help of the rapidly developing remote-sensingtechnologies. These researches certainly served the off-springs ofsubsequent planetary geology and their feed-back to terrestrialgeology studies in helping to understand different aspects of mono-genetic volcanism. Furthermore, a considerable amount of researchenergy was invested in understanding the physics behind melt(magma) and water interactions in the 1970s and 1980s with the aimto link experiment results with “real” products formed by volcanoes.As a culmination of these research efforts in the 1990s, an importantstep forward was made, when the methods of experimentalvolcanology were applied to better understand magma-water inter-actions. This approach and its results have provided the foundations ofour current understanding of explosive hydromagmatic volcanism, aphenomenon that involves external water for fuelling an explosiveeruption. In addition, sedimentological approaches were combinedwith detailed geochemical analyses in order to establish key conceptspresently applied in elucidating the architecture of scoria cones, tuffrings, maars, and tuff cones. Also, an increasing number of studieshave been devoted to characterise the distribution patterns of mono-genetic volcanic fields and their connection with structural and geo-physical data of the tectonic environment in which they occur. Thedifficulties of evaluating the volcanic hazards and risks that a volcanicfield canpose for anever-growingpopulation have also been recognised(increasingly after the 1990s), and new mathematical methods thatinclude the development of probabilistic volcanic hazard models havebeen applied.

The growing interest in monogenetic volcanoes and volcanic fieldsis demonstrated well in a reference-search in major internet-databases such as Scopus. Searching for keywords such as “maar”,“scoria cone”, and “monogenetic volcanic” shows a gradual and steadyincrease of the number of publications over the past years (Fig. 1). Asimilar trend can be found in theWeb of Science data base that reflects

Fig. 2. Increasing number of published papers (left column) deals with keywords such as mdatabase. In the right column increasing citation values can be seen by choosing the same

an increasing number of publications related to monogeneticvolcanism and a significant increase in the number of citations thatsuch publications have gotten across the published items (Fig. 2). Bothanalyses show that thematic conferences (such as the 2IMC in 2004)and special volumes mark an increase of research activity. Hopefully,the present JVGR Special Volume on Maars and Scoria Cones willserve the same purpose and instigate researchers to carry out newstudies by providing a snapshot of our current knowledge on themostcommon type of volcanism on Earth and other Planets: monogeneticvolcanism.

Finally, as Guest Editors, we wish to express our gratitude to allthe Journal Reviewers who made a significant impact and helpedto mprove the quality of the papers published in this volume. Inalphabetical order the following reviewers participated in thisendeavour:

Aranda Gómez, José Jorge (México)Behncke, Boris (Italy)Bertotto, Gustavo Walter (Argentina)Bishop, Mark (Australia)Bjerg, Ernesto A. (Argentina)Blatter, Dawnika L. (USA)Brittany Dawn, Brand (USA)Breitkreuz, Christoph (Germany)Brenna, Marco (New Zealand)Buechel, Georg (Germany)Cañón-Tapia, Edgardo (México)Carrasco-Núñez, Gerardo (México)Cassidy, John (New Zealand)Dellino, Pierfrancesco (Italy)Del Potro, Rodrigo (Costa Rica)De Rita, Donatella (Italy)D'Orazzio, Massimo (Italy)D'Oriano, Claudia (Italy)Duffield, Wendell A. (USA)Fedortchouk, Yana (Canada)Gamble, John (Australia)Gardner, James (USA)Giammanco, Salvatore (Italy)

aar, diatreme, tuff ring, scoria cone and monogenetic volcanic based on Web of Sciencekeywords as in the published items column (Web of Science database).

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Giordano, Guido (Italy)Gorman, Andrew (New Zealand)Goth, Kurt (Germany)Heiken, H. Grant (USA)Hintz, Amanda (USA)Inbar, Moshe (Israel)Kano, Kazuhiko (Japan)Kjarsgaard, A. Bruce (Canada)Kokelaar, Peter (UK)Kurszlaukis, Stephan (Canada)Lara, Luis E. (Chile)Layer, Paul (USA)Llambías, Eduardo (Argentina)Lucchi, Federico (Italy)Macías, José Luis (México)Mazzarini, Francesco (Italy)Monaco, Carmelo (Italy)Nicholls, Ian (Australia)Ort, Michael (USA)Palladino, M. Danilo (Italy)Radulian, Mircea (Romania)Risso, Corina (Argentina)Rouwet, Dmitri (Italy)Rowland, Julie (New Zealand)Self, Stephen (USA)Schaaf, Peter (México)Smellie, John L. (United Kingdom)Sohn, Young Kwan (South Korea)Solgevik, Henrik (Sweden)Sottili, Gianluca (Italy)

Suteanu, Cristian (Canada)Taddeucci, Jacopo (Italy)Viramonte, José Germán (Argentina)White, Craig M. (USA)White, James D.L. (New Zealand)Widom, Elisabeth (USA)WoldeGabriel, Giday (USA)Wonik, Thomas (Germany)Wood, Charles (USA)Zimanowski, Bernd (Germany)

We hope you will enjoy this volume,Kind regards

Guest Editors of the JVGR Maars and Scoria Cones Special VolumeKároly Németh, Palmerston North, New ZealandMiguel J. Haller, Puerto Madryn, ArgentinaClaus Siebe, México City, México

Károly NémethPalmerston North, New Zealand

Corresponding author.E-mail address: k.nemeth@massey.ac.nz.

Miguel J. HallerPuerto Madryn, Argentina

Claus SiebeMéxico City, Mexico