Effect of stress fields on magma chamber stability and the formation of collapse calderas

The summits of many of the Earth’s and other planets’ larger volcanoes are occupied by calderas that formed by collapse into an evacuating, underlying magma chamber. These collapse calderas are typically several tens of square kilometers in area and are commonly elliptical in shape. We show that the long axes of late Quaternary collapse calderas in the Kenya rift valley, the western Basin and Range province, the Snake River‐Yellowstone Plateau, and the Iceland rift zone are parallel to the upper crustal minimum horizontal stress direction (Sh) as determined by independent criteria. We suggest that circular magma chambers beneath these volcanoes became elliptical by stress‐induced spalling of their chamber walls, by a mechanism that is analogous to the formation of breakouts in boreholes and tunnels. In breakouts, the hole becomes elongate parallel to the far‐field minimum stress. In the Kenya rift, Late Pleistocene caldera collapse was accompanied by a 45° rotation of Sh and an increase in the magnitude of the maximum horizontal stress (SH). The breakout model predicts increasingly unstable caldera walls under these conditions, a possible explanation for the sudden appearance of so many collapse events in a volcanic setting that had never experienced them before. This mechanism of stress change‐induced collapse may have played a role in other caldera settings.