Oceanic crust – Earth-logs

News about when subduction began

Published on July 6, 2023July 5, 2023 by zooks777Leave a comment

Tangible signs of past subduction take the form of rocks whose mineralogy shows that they have been metamorphosed under conditions of high pressure and low temperature, and then returned to the surface somehow. Ocean-crust basaltic rocks become blueschist and eclogite. The latter is denser than mantle peridotite so that oceanic lithosphere can sink and be recycled. That provides the slab-pull force, which is the major driver of plate tectonics. Unfortunately, neither blueschists nor eclogites are found in metamorphic complexes older than about 800 Ma. This absence of direct proof of subduction and thus modern style plate tectonics has resulted in lively discussion and research seeking indirect evidence for when it did begin, the progress of which since 2000 you can follow through the index for annual logs about tectonics. An interesting new approach emerged in 2017 that sought a general theory for the evolution of silicate planets, which involves the concept of ‘lid tectonics’. A planet in a stagnant-lid phase has a lithosphere that is weak as a result of high temperatures: indeed so weak and warm that subduction was impossible. Stagnant-lid tectonics does not recycle crustal material back to its source in the mantle and it simply builds up the lithosphere. Once planetary heat production wanes below a threshold level that permits a rigid lithosphere, parts of the lid can be driven into the mantle. The beginnings of this mobile-lid phase and thus plate tectonics of some kind involves surface materials in mantle convection: the may be recycled.

Cartoon of possible Hadean stagnant lid tectonics, dominated by mantle plumes. (Credit: Bédard, J.H. 2018, Fig 3B, DOI: 10.1016/j.gsf.2017.01.005)

A group of geochemists from China, Canada and Australia have sought evidence for recycled crustal rocks from silicon and oxygen isotopes in the oldest large Archaean terrane, the 4.0 Ga old Acasta Gneiss Complex in northern Canada (Zhang, Q. and 10 others 2023. No evidence of supracrustal recycling in Si-O isotopes of Earth’s oldest rocks 4 Ga ago. Science Advances, v.9, article eadf0693; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf0693). Silicon has three stable isotopes ²⁸Si, ²⁹Si, and ³⁰Si. As happens with a number of elements, various geochemical processes are able to selectively change the relative proportions of such isotopes: a process known as isotope fractionation. As regards silicon isotopes used to chart lithosphere recycling, the basic steps are as follows: Organisms that now remove silicon from solution in seawater to form their hard parts and accumulate in death as fine sediments like flint had not evolved in the Archaean. Because of that reasonable supposition it has been suggested that seawater during the Archaean contained far more dissolved silicon than it does now. Such a rich source of Si would have entered Archaean oceanic crust and ocean-floor sediments to precipitate silica ‘cement’. The heaviest isotope ³⁰Si would have left solution more easily than the lighter two. Should such silicified lithosphere have descended to depths in the mantle where it could partially melt the anomalously high ³⁰Si would be transferred to the resulting magmas.

Proportions of 30Si in zircons, quartz and whole rock for Acasta gneisses (coloured), other Archaean areas (grey) and Jack Hills zircons (open circles. Vertical lines are error bars. (Credit: simplified from Zhang et al. Fig 1)

Stable-isotope analyses by Zhang et al. revealed that zircon and quartz grains and bulk rock samples from the Acasta gneisses, with undisturbed U-Pb ages, contain ³⁰Si in about the same proportions relative to silicon’s other stable isotopes as do samples of the mantle. So it seems that the dominant trondhjemite-tonalite-granodiorite (TTG) rocks that make up the oldest Acasta gneisses were formed by partial melting of a source that did not contain rocks from the ocean crust. Yet the Acasta Gneiss Complex also contains younger granitic rocks (3.75 to 3.50 Ga) and they are significantly more enriched in ³⁰Si, as expected from a deep source that contained formerly oceanic rocks. A similar ‘heavy’ silicon-isotope signature is also found in samples from other Archaean terranes that are less than 3.8 Ga old. Thus a major shift from stagnant-lid tectonics to the mobile-lid form may have occurred at the end of the Hadean. But apart from the Acasta Gneiss Complex only one other, much smaller Hadean terrane has been discovered, the 4.2 Ga Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt. It occupies a mere 20 km² on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in Canada, and appears to be a sample of Hadean oceanic crust. It does include TTG gneisses, but they are about 3.8 Ga old and contain isotopically heavy silicon. So it seems unlikely that testing this hypothesis with silicon-isotope data from other Hadean gneissic terranes will be possible for quite a while, if at all.

An Early Archaean Waterworld

Published on March 4, 2020March 5, 2020 by zooks7776 Comments

In Earth-logs you may have come across the uses of oxygen isotopes, mainly in connection with their variations in the fossils of marine organisms and in ice cores. The relative proportion of the ‘heavy’ ¹⁸O isotope to the ‘light’ ¹⁶O, expressed by δ¹⁸O, is a measure of the degree of fractionation between these isotopes under different temperature conditions when water evaporates. What happens is that H₂¹⁶O, in which the lighter isotope is bound up, slightly more easily evaporates thus enriching the remaining liquid water in H₂¹⁸O. As a result the greater the temperature of surface water and the more of evaporates, the higher is its δ¹⁸O value. Shells that benthonic (surface-dwelling) organism secrete are made mainly of the mineral calcite (CaCO₃). Their formation involves extracting dissolved calcium ions and CO₂ plus an extra oxygen from the water itself, as calcite’s formula suggests. So plankton shells fossilised in ocean-floor sediments carry the δ¹⁸O and thus a temperature signal of surface water at the place and time in which they lived. Yet this signal is contaminated with another signal: that of the amount of water evaporated from the ocean surface (with lowered δ¹⁸O) that has ended up falling as snow and then becoming trapped in continental ice sheets. The two can be separated using the δ¹⁸O found in shells of bottom-dwelling (benthonic) organisms, because deep ocean water maintains a similar low temperature at all time (about 2°C). Benthonic δ¹⁸O is the main guide to the changing volume of continental ice throughout the last 30 million year or so. This ingenious approach, developed about 50 years ago, has become the key to understanding past climate changes as reflected in records of ice volume and ocean surface temperature. Yet these two factors are not the only ones at work on marine oxygen isotopes.

Artistic impression of the Early Archaean Earth dominated by oceans (Credit: Sci-news.com)

When rainwater flows across the land, clays in the soil formed by weathering of crystalline rocks preferentially extract ¹⁸O and thus leave their own δ¹⁸O mark in ocean water. This has little, if any, effect on the use of δ¹⁸O to track past climate change, simply because the extent of the continents hasn’t changed much over the last 2 billion years or so. Likewise, the geological record over that period clearly indicates that rain, wet soil and water flowing across the land have all continued somewhere or other, irrespective of climate. However, one of the thorny issues in Earth science concerns changes of the area of continents in the very long term. They are suspected but difficult to tie down. Benjamin Johnson of the University of Colorado and Boswell Wing of Iowa State University, USA, have closely examined oxygen isotopes in 3.24 billion-year old rocks from a relic of Palaeoarchaean ocean crust from the Pilbara district of Western Australia that shows pervasive evidence of alteration by hot circulating ocean water (Johnson, B.W. & Wing, B.A. 2020. Limited Archaean continental emergence reflected in an early Archaean ¹⁸O-enriched ocean. Nature Geoscience, v. 13, p. 243-248; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0538-9). Interestingly, apart from the composition of the lavas, the altered rocks look just the same as much more recent examples of such ophiolites.

The study used many samples taken from the base to the top of the ophiolite along some 20 traverses across its outcrop. Overall the isotopic analyses suggested that the circulating water responsible for the hydrothermal alteration 3.2 Ga ago was much more enriched in ¹⁸O than is modern ocean water. The authors’ favoured explanation is that much less continental crust was exposed above sea level during the Palaeoarchaean Era than in later times and so far less clay was around on land. That does not necessarily imply that less continental crust existed at that time compared with the Archaean during the following 700 Ma , merely that the continental ‘freeboard’ was so low that only a few islands emerged above the waves. By the end of the Archaean 2.5 Ga ago the authors estimate that oceanic δ¹⁸O had decreased to approximately modern levels. This they attribute to a steady increase in weathering of the emerging continental landmasses and the extraction of ¹⁸O into new, clay-rich soils as the continents emerged above sea level. How this scenario of a ‘drowned’ world developed is not discussed. One possibility is that the average depth of the oceans then was considerably less than it was in later times: i.e. sea level stood higher because the volume available to contain ocean water was less. One possible explanation for that and the subsequent change in oxygen isotopes might be a transition during the later Archaean Eon into modern-style plate tectonics. The resulting steep subduction forms deep trench systems able to ‘hold’ more water. Prior to that faster production of oceanic crust resulted in what are now the ocean abyssal plains being buoyed up by warmer young crust that extended beneath them. Today they average around 4000 m deep, thanks to the increased density of cooled crust, and account for a large proportion of the volume of modern ocean basins.

Ancient oceanic lithosphere beneath the eastern Mediterranean

Published on August 22, 2016 by zooks777Leave a comment

The extensive active subduction zones around the Pacific ocean are responsible for a dearth of oceanic lithosphere older than about 200 Ma that still remains where it formed. Trying to get an idea of pre-Mesozoic ocean-floor processes depends almost entirely on fragmented ophiolites thrust or obducted onto continent at destructive plate margins. Yet the characteristically striped magnetic signature above in situ oceanic lithosphere offers a good chance of spotting any old oceanic areas, provided the stripes are not imperceptible because of thick sediment cover. One of the most intriguing areas of ocean floor is that beneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea in the 3 km deep Herodotus Basin, which has long been thought to preserve a relic of old ocean floor. Roi Granot of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel has analysed magnetic data gathered along 7 000 km of survey lines and indeed there are vague traces of stripy geomagnetic variation that has a long wavelength, to be precise there are two bands of . Mathematical analysis of the magnetic profiles suggest that they have a source about 13 to 17 km beneath the seabed: probably crystalline crust beneath thick Mesozoic sediments (Granot, R. 2016. Palaeozoic oceanic crust preserved beneath the eastern Mediterranean. Nature Geoscience, doi:10.1038/ngeo2784).

The shape of the anomalies cannot be matched with those of younger magnetic stripes, but can be modelled to fit with a sequence of normal-reverse-normal magnetic polarity preserved in continental sequences of early Carboniferous age, about 340 Ma ago. At that age, the lithosphere would by now be old, cold and dense enough to subside to the observed depth, but the fact that it escaped subduction during amalgamation of Pangaea in the Upper Palaeozoic or when Africa collided with Eurasia in the early Cenozoic is a puzzle. Granot reckons that it most likely formed in Pangaea’s great eastern ocean embayment, known as Palaeotethys. An interesting view, but one that does not seem likely to lead any further, simply because of the great depth to which the oceanic material is buried. The deepest yet to be achieved is only 12 km in the onshore Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia. So the changes of getting samples are slim, even if the overlying sedimentary pile proves to have hydrocarbon potential.

English: Pangea animation — Pangea break-up animation ( credit: Wikipedia)

Brittle-ductile deformation in subduction zones

Published on August 25, 2012 by zooks777Leave a comment

The ultra-dense form of basalt, eclogite made from mainly garnet and a strange high-pressure, low-temperature pyroxene (omphacite) that forms from plagioclase and some of the basalt’s ferromagnesian minerals, is possibly the most important rock there is. Without the basalt to eclogite transition that takes place when ocean-floor is subducted the density of the lithosphere would be insufficient to pull more ocean floor to destruction and maintain the planetary circulation otherwise known as plate tectonics. Since the transition involves the formation of anhydrous eclogite from old, cold and wet basalt water is driven upwards into the mantle wedge that lies over subduction zones. The encourages partial melting which creates andesite magmas and island arcs, the ultimate source of the Earth’s continental crust.

Despite being cold and rigid, subducted oceanic lithosphere somehow manages to be moved en masse, showing its track by earthquakes down to almost 700 km below the Earth’s surface. A major ophiolite in the Western Alps on the Franco-Italian border escaped complete loss to the mantle by rebounding upwards after being subducted and metamorphosed under high-P, Low-T condition when the Alps began to form. So the basaltic crustal unit is eclogite and that preserves a petrographic record of what actually happened as it descended (Angiboust, S. et al. 2012. Eclogite breccia in a subducted ophiolite: A record of intermediate depth earthquakes? Geology, v. 40, p. 707-710). The French geologists found breccias consisting of gabbroic eclogite blocks set in a matrix of serpentinite and talc. The blocks themselves are breccias too, with clasts of eclogite mylonite set in fine-grained lawsonite-bearing eclogite. The relationships in the breccias point to possibly earthquake-related processes, grinding and fracturing basalt as it was metamorphosed: an essentially brittle process, yet the shearing that forms mylonites does seem reminiscent of ductile deformation too.

The deformation seems to have been at the middle level of oceanic crust where oceanic basalt lavas formed above cumulate gabbro, their plutonic equivalents. Yet much deformation was also at the gabbro-serpentinite or crust-mantle boundary, where water loss from serpentine may have helped lubricate some of the processes. Clearly the Monviso ophiolite will soon become a place to visit for geophysicists as well as metamorphic petrologists.

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