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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Earth Sci.

Sec. Structural Geology and Tectonics

This article is part of the Research TopicMagmatism at Divergent Plate Boundaries: From Rifts to RidgesView all articles

Segmented dike intrusion linked to multi-level magma storage during and before the 2025 eruption at Erta Ale (East Africa)

Provisionally accepted
Alessandro La RosaAlessandro La Rosa1*Carolina PagliCarolina Pagli1Derek KeirDerek Keir2,3Atalay AyeleAtalay Ayele4Hua WangHua Wang5Eleonora RivaltaEleonora Rivalta6,7Elias LewiElias Lewi4
  • 1Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
  • 2School of Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom
  • 3Department of Earth Science, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
  • 4Addis Ababa University Institute of Geophysics Space Science and Astronomy, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
  • 5College of Natural Resources and Environment, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, China
  • 6GFZ Helmholtz-Zentrum fur Geoforschung, Potsdam, Germany
  • 7Universita degli Studi di Bologna Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia Augusto Righi, Bologna, Italy

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Dike intrusions can assist continental rifting and plate divergence. However, our understanding of the magma dynamics during diking and the architecture of the magma storage that feeds dikes are still limited by temporally and spatially sparse dataset. In this study we used multiple evidence from InSAR, optical data, pixel offset tracking and seismicity to reconstruct the temporal evolution of the intrusion and the magma storage that fed the dike at the Erta Ale volcanic system (Afar Rift, East Africa), before and during the recent volcanic activity of July-August 2025. During 25 days, a dike propagated southward for 36 km, intruding a total of ~0.3 km3 of mafic magma. InSAR modeling showed the dike intrusion was fed by multiple magma bodies, including a dike-shaped magmatic source and two shallow (~1 km) magmatic sills. InSAR time-series of the pre-diking period also revealed a deeper (~7 km) magmatic source that could have partially supplied the intrusion. The event, while much larger in volume, shows similarities to previous dike intrusions at Erta Ale, implying the presence of a long-lived multi-level magma storage system within the Erta Ale volcanic system.

Keywords: Dikes, InSAR, rift, East Africa, Magma

Received: 06 Oct 2025; Accepted: 13 Nov 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 La Rosa, Pagli, Keir, Ayele, Wang, Rivalta and Lewi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Alessandro La Rosa, alessandro.larosa@dst.unipi.it

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