Constraining the Conditions Required for the Delamination of Subducting Crust

Abstract:

It is commonly accepted that the building of the continental crust is linked to subduction zone processes, but the refining mechanism isolating the felsic product from its basaltic counterpart, leading to a stratified crust, remains poorly understood. Delamination of subducting material and its subsequent melting and segregation, with the felsic part being underplated and added to the crust from below has been suggested to be a viable scenario.

In this study we use thermo-mechanical numerical models of subduction to explore the possibility of delamination of the igneous slab crust and determine the conditions that are required by varying key parameters, such as subduction speed and angle, slab age, crustal thickness and density, overriding plate thickness, mantle temperature, depth of eclogitisation and the rheological properties for crustal and mantle material. We also quantify the extent of the resultant crustal melting, and its composition.
Our preliminary models demonstrate that for present day mantle potential temperatures and average slab crustal thickness, the slab crust may only delaminate for extreme rheologies (i.e very weak crust), making slab mafic crust delamination unlikely. Contrastingly, in an early earth setting (High mantle temperature potential and thicker mafic slab crust) we find that the whole crustal scale delamination of the subducting mafic crust is a dynamically viable mechanism for a reasonable rheology when slabs are younger than ~20Ma. The resulting delamination leads to buoyant upwelling and ponding of mafic crustal material beneath the overriding lithosphere. After only ~5 Myrs from the onset of delamination, delaminated mafic crust would sit in the hot mantle wedge, where it would likely cross its solidus. These melts would be readily segregated from the migmatitic mafic source and contribute to the formation of felsic crust with little interaction with the mantle wedge, explaining part of the spectrum of TTG forming the earliest continental crust.