Boiling Lake of Dominica, West Indies: High-temperature volcanic crater lake dynamics

摘要

The Boiling Lake of Dominica has exhibited stable high-temperature behavior for at least 150 a. This stability is punctuated by occasional crises involving rapid filling and draining of the lake and changes in water temperature. The most recent such crisis occurred in December 2004 to April 2005. Using the results of previous theoretical and experimental work on analogue models, we present a combined thermal, hydrological, and fluid mechanical model of the Boiling Lake. This reveals that the lake appears to be suspended above the local water table by a constant supply of rising steam bubbles sourced from the boiling of groundwater near an igneous intrusion. The bubbles condense in the Boiling Lake, maintaining the temperature at ~90°C. The geometry of the lake-conduit system provides a mechanism for instability, with a denser liquid lake overlying a bubbly fractured permeable conduit Following a sufficiently large perturbation, the whole lake rapidly drains until the surface is at the local water table level. The persistent gas supply then reinitiates filling. We propose that local seismic activity may have caused shock nucleation of bubbles within the conduit and triggered the instability of the Boiling Lake.