A tuya in Togiak Valley, Southwest Alaska
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Abstract
The shape, composition, structure, and location of a conspicuous flat-topped mountain in the lower Togiak Valley, southwest Alaska, all indicate that it formed by a subglacial volcanic eruption of olivine basalt. Volcanoes of this type are known as "tuyas." The Togiak tuya erupted into an intraglacial lake in a hole thawed through a glacier that occupied Togiak Valley in Pleistocene time. The eruption was localized along the Togiak fault, which defines the east side of a shallow graben that is floored by older olivine basalt flows. The tuya, which has an area of 15 square kilometers, is a parallelogram. The flat summit, about 300 meters above the valley floor, is capped by glassy, fine-grained subaerial flows of alkali olivine basalt. To the north, the capping flows overlie palagonitized glassy tuffs; to the south, they overlie pillow basalts and breccia. The elevation of the pillow basalts indicates that surface of the melt-water lake was at least 250 m above present-day sea level. Basalt xenoliths in the tuffs and comparison with other better exposed tuyas suggest that the tuffs probably overlie an older pile of subaqueous pillow basalts that erupted beneath the intraglacial lake. The tuya overlies and is much younger than the preglacial flows on valley floor that yielded a potassium-argon age of 0.758±0.2 million years.
Study Area
| Publication type | Article |
|---|---|
| Publication Subtype | Journal Article |
| Title | A tuya in Togiak Valley, Southwest Alaska |
| Series title | Journal of Research of the U.S. Geological Survey |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Year Published | 1978 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | U.S. Geological Survey |
| Description | 9 p. |
| First page | 193 |
| Last page | 201 |
| Country | United States |
| State | Alaska |
| Other Geospatial | Togiak Valley |
| Google Analytic Metrics | Metrics page |