Fabric Development in Sheared Mantle Rocks: The Source of the ‘a-c’ Switch

Researchers often invoke variations in water content, stress state, and melt distribution to account for the observed variety of olivine crystallographic preferred orientations (CPOs). Since the average direction of [100] axes directly affects seismic anisotropy, there is potential to link observed anisotropy to compositional and thermo-mechanical conditions. It is well established that the (010)[100] is the weakest slip system, and therefore thought to control CPOs, in dry olivine at P < 2 GPa. However, CPOs formed in experiments on olivine plus mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) reveal a fabric in which [001] axes form weak point maxima parallel to the shear direction, and [010] axes form strong point maxima perpendicular to the shear plane, indicative of (010)[001] as the weak slip system.

To investigate the mechanisms that cause this change in CPO, samples fabricated from fine-grained San Carlos olivine plus MORB were deformed in torsion at T = 1200°C and P = 300 MPa. Samples with starting melt fractions of 0.01, 0.10 and 0.25 were sheared to a maximum strain of γ ≈ 13.

We investigate three hypotheses. 1) The easiest slip direction changes from [100] to [001] in partially molten rocks. However, no microstructural evidence for such a change has been found. 2) With the presence of a melt phase, shape preferred orientations (SPOs) play an important role in fabric development. We test this hypothesis by examining the relationship between SPOs and CPOs as a function of strain and melt content. 3) Anisotropy in the melt distribution leads to anisotropy in grain-boundary sliding, thus preferentially favoring grain rotations necessary to produce the observed fabric. We test this hypothesis by detailed analysis of misorientations between neighboring grains. Our results will provide a crucial link between seismic anisotropy and grain-scale deformation processes.