In situ observation of crystallographic preferred orientation of deforming olivine at high pressure and high temperature

Abstract:

Olivine is the main constituent mineral in Earth’s upper mantle, and its crystallographic preferred orientation (CPO) controls the seismic anisotropy in the upper mantle. Because the relationship between fabric strength and seismic anisotropy shows an exponential form (Ismail and Mainprice, 1998), seismic anisotropy in the upper mantle is expected to have an upperlimit value. Hansen et al., (2014) demonstrated that a steady-state fabric of olivine is not reached until a very large shear strain (γ> 10) and fabric strength of olivine increases up to the J-index of 10−30 at 0.3 GPa. However, the strain dependency on the fabric strength of olivine needs to be evaluated at asthenospheric upper mantle pressures (2-13 GPa) because the relative activity of each slip system in olivine changes depending on pressure (e.g., Raterron et al., 2007).

We experimentally evaluated the strain dependency of fabric strength of olivine in simple-shear geometry under upper mantle conditions (pressures of 1.3−3.8 GPa and temperatures of 1223−1573 K). The CPO of olivine was calculated from in-situ two-dimensional X-ray diffraction patterns. In the calculation, we simulated the optimized CPO which reproduces the two-dimensional X-ray diffraction pattern adopted from the experiments. The steady-state fabric strength of the A-type fabric was achieved within total shear strain of γ = 2. At strains higher than γ = 1, an increase in concentration of the [010] axes mainly contributes to an increase in fabric strength. At strains higher than γ = 2, the magnitude of V_SH/V_SV (i.e., ratio of horizontally and vertically polarized shear wave velocities) scarcely increased in most of the runs. The V_SH/V_SV of peridotite having the steady-state A-type olivine fabric coincides with that of recent global one-dimensional models under the assumption of horizontal flow, suggesting that the seismic anisotropy observed in the shallow upper mantle is mostly explained by the development of A-type olivine fabric.