Here we describe a new experimental setup for in situ thermal characterization of cooling/crystallizing lavas during viscosity measurement at temperatures up to 1600 °C. We use this device to recover in situ, real-time, observations of the combined rheological and thermal evolution of natural, re-melted lava samples during the transient disequilibrium conditions characteristic of lava flows and shallow crustal magma migration and storage systems in nature.
We present the calibration procedure and the method employed to recover the thermal evolution of an experimental sample during flow in varying shear regimes, assess the experimental uncertainty and show the ability of the apparatus to measure the release of latent heat of crystallization during transient rheological experiments. We further report the results from a first experimental study on the rheological and thermal evolution of a basaltic lava undergoing continuous cooling at a series of different cooling rates and discuss the implications of the results for magma migration and lava flow emplacement.