H43A-0942:
Tectonic Evolution of Chingshui Geothermal Field Inferred from Evidence of Quartz and Calcite Veins
Thursday, 18 December 2014
Yi-Chia Lu, Department of Geoscience, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, Sheng-Rong Song, NTU National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, Pei-Ling Wang, Natl Taiwan Univ, Taipei, Taiwan, Chia-Mei Liu, Chinese Culture University, Taipei, Taiwan and En-Chao Yeh, NTNU National Taiwan Normal University, Department of Earth Sciences, Taipei, Taiwan
Abstract:
The Chingshui geothermal field is located in the valley of Chingshui stream, where is about 27 km SW of Ilan, northeastern Taiwan. It is a tectonically complex area occurred by the Philippine Plate subducting beneath the Eurasian plate in the south with Okinawa Trough opening in the Ilan Plain. Owing to complicated geological structure, the heat source of Chingshui geothermal field is still controversial. For understanding hot fluid sources and tectonic evolution, this study focuses on field survey of veins and scaling in the Chingshui geothermal field, and the results inferred from the data of SEM, XRD, carbon and oxygen isotope, and Uranium-thorium dating. The Chingshui hot fluid contains both high concentrations of SiO2 and HCO3-, therefore, temperature and pressure both drop when the hot fluids inject into shallower fractures, and calcite and quartz both could be precipitated with competition or simultaneously. In Chilukeng River, many euhedral quartz crystals occurred in large damage zone of Xioananao fault that indicated the temperature drop played the dominated role when the hot fluids injected into the shallow. It inferred that the quartz crystal precipitated under compression stress, evidenced by the Xioananao thrust fault with no surface rupture. Whiles, there are gouges in normal fault with abundant calcite or calcite with quartz veins cropped out in the confluence of Chingshui River and Chilukeng River. The results indicate that those veins occurred in more recent period by U-Th dating data, because of degassing CO2 occurred in open fractures by normal faulting or the stress changing from compression to extension. The standard oxygen isotopes range from 1.29 to 20.73 permil of SMOW and the clumped isotope of Δ47 outcrop is 0.385 in calcite veins, suggest that the highest temperature of thermal fulids with calcite precipitations is 222℃±9℃ by calibrated equation of Passey and Henkes 2012. Meanwhile, it also indicates that the oxygen isotope of initial water is 6.31 permil of SMOW which is totally different from the values of -5.36 and -6.5~-7.1 in the meteoric water of Chingshui area and the scaling of Well IC-13, respectively. This result infers that the compositions of hot fluids may be changed with different source in the Chingshui geothermal field.
