T11A-4531:
Roles of magmatic oxygen fugacity and water content in generating signatures of continental crust in the Alaska-Aleutian arc

Monday, 15 December 2014
Katherine A Kelley1, Elizabeth Cottrell2, Maryjo N Brounce1,2 and Zoe Gentes1, (1)University of Rhode Island Narragansett Bay, Narragansett, RI, United States, (2)Smithsonian, NMNH, Washington, DC, United States
Abstract:
Early depletion of Fe during magmatic differentiation is a characteristic of many arc magmas, and this may drive them towards the bulk composition of continental crust. In the Alaska-Aleutian arc, magmas are strongly Fe-depleted both in the east, where the arc sits atop pre-existing continental crust, and in the west, where the system is oceanic but convergence is highly oblique. Primary basaltic arc magmas may achieve early Fe depletion through a combination of high magmatic H2O, which delays silicate saturation, and high oxygen fugacity (fO2), which promotes early onset of Fe-oxide crystallization. Alternatively, low-Fe, high Mg# magmas may emerge directly from the arc mantle, possibly due to slab melting, driving mixing with Fe-rich basaltic magmas. Yet, the relative importance of H2O, fO2, and magmatic bulk composition in generating Fe-depletion is not clearly resolved. Here, we present new measurements of the oxidation state of Fe (Fe3+/∑Fe ratio; a proxy for magmatic fO2), in combination with major element and volatile data, of olivine-hosted melt inclusions from four Alaska-Aleutian arc volcanoes (Okmok, Seguam, Korovin, Augustine), acquired using XANES spectroscopy. We use the Tholeiitic Index (THI) of Zimmer et al., 2010 to quantify the behavior of Fe in each volcano magma series (<1 is Fe-depleted, >1 is Fe-enriched). These volcanoes span a range of THI, from 0.9-0.65. The Fe3+/∑Fe ratios of Aleutian basalts, corrected for fractional crystallization to 6 wt.% MgO (i.e., Fe3+/∑Fe6.0) range from 0.22-0.31 and correlate strongly with THI (r2>0.99), such that more Fe-depleted magmas contain a greater proportion of oxidized Fe. The maximum dissolved H2O contents of basaltic melt inclusions from these volcanoes also strongly correlate with THI (r2>0.96), and with measured Fe3+/∑Fe ratios (although H2O is not the direct cause of oxidation). These links point to a slab-derived origin of both H2O and oxidation and thus relate slab fluxes to the Fe-depletion trends of arc magmas. These correlations also illustrate the difficulty of separating the effects of H2O and fO2 on arc magmatic differentiation, as the two are challenging to isolate in nature. Analysis of experimental data, however, suggest that fO2 exhibits stronger control than H2O on the relative appearance of spinel and silicates on the liquidus.