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Abstract Explosive eruptions produce various types of pyroclasts including those contain few with groundmass crystals. The textural variation such as the number density, size, and volume of groundmass crystals is expected to reveal the complex magma dynamics during syneruptive ascent in conduits; however, we have no quantitative method to investigate the magma dynamics based on crystal texture when the pyroclasts show glassy texture with a small number of microlites. Here we show that the variation of combination of crystallographic faces (i.e., tracht) of groundmass pyroxene crystals enables us to derive the degree of effective undercooling (ΔTeff) and magma ascent histories even from the glassy pyroclasts. We conducted decompression experiments and analyzed trachts of groundmass pyroxene crystals in the run products in addition to those in natural pumices from the 1914 Plinian eruption of Sakurajima volcano. These results show that the glassy white pumices experienced higher ΔTeff than the crystal-rich gray pumice, and corroborated that they originate from the magmas at different positions from the conduit walls. The estimate on ΔTeff implies that the magma rapidly ascended in the center of the conduit might experience cooling because of volatile exsolution and expansion.
Okumura et al. (Fri,) studied this question.