Toga Volcano : An Alkali-Rhyolite Tuff-ring in the Western end of Oga Peninsula, NE Japan

Abstract

An alkali-rhyolite tuff-ring is newly identified in the western end of the Oga Peninsula and named as Toga volcano in this paper. The existence of this maar-type volcano at the Toga Bay has been suspected for a long time because of the elliptical embayment reminiscent of a maar and the distribution of the Toga Pumice localized along the bay coast. The Toga Pumice is cornposed mainly of pumice and non- to poorly-vesicular glass shards, but many pumices of lapilli size are rounded and fines are poor giving a sandy epiclastic appearance to the deposit. In our latest survey along the bay coast, the Toga Pumice is found to be in direct contact with the basement rocks. The contact steeply inclines at 40-50° and envelopes an elliptical area 2.0 km×2.4 km covering the bay and bay coast to form a funnel-shape structure. The basement rocks at the contact are brecciated to a depth of several tens of centimeters, or collapsed into fragments to be contained in the Toga Pumice. The beds inside the inferred crater incline toward the center of the crater at 10-30° or much smaller angles, presumably reflecting a shallow concave structure infilling the more steeply sided crater. The deposit is thinly to thickly bedded to be parallel- to wavy- or cross-stratified, inversely to normally graded with many furrows, rip-up clasts and load casts, and is sorted as well as fines-depleted pyroclastic flow deposits and/or pyroclastic surge deposits. These features are characterisitic to turbidites and indicate the place of emplacement was filled with water. Constituent glass shards are, however, commonly platy or blocky and likely to be phreatomagmatic in origin, and pumice lapilli are interpreted to have been originally angular but rounded by repeated entrainment and abrasion in multiple phreatomagmatic eruptions and succeeding emplacement in the crater lake. A pyroclastic surge deposit (Oga Pumice Tuff) correlative in composition and age to the Toga Pumice occurs at Anden and Wakimoto, 11 km and 15 km east of Toga, respectively. The juvenile pumice lapilli are angular to subrounded, in contrast with the pumice lapilli of the Toga Pumice.