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Transfer of olivine crystallographic orientation through a cycle of serpentinisation and dehydration

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Abstract

Our ability to decipher the mechanisms behind metamorphic transformation processes depends in a major way on the extent to which crystallographic and microstructural information is transferred from one stage to another. Within the Leka Ophiolite Complex in the Central Norwegian Caledonides, prograde olivine veins that formed by dehydration of serpentinite veins in dunites exhibit a characteristic distribution of microstructures: The outer part of the veins comprises coarse-grained olivine that forms an unusual, brick-like microstructure. The inner part of the veins, surrounding a central fault, is composed of fine-grained olivine. Where the fault movement included a dilational component, optically clear, equant olivine occurs in the centre. Electron backscatter diffraction mapping reveals that the vein olivine has inherited its crystallographic preferred orientation (CPO) from the olivine in the porphyroclastic host rock; however, misorientation is weaker and associated to different rotation axes. We propose that prograde olivine grew epitaxially on relics of mantle olivine and thereby acquired its CPO. Growth towards pre-existing microfractures along which serpentinisation had occurred led to straight grain boundaries and a brick-like microstructure in the veins. When dehydration embrittlement induced slip, a strong strain localisation on discrete fault planes prevented distortion of the CPO due to cataclastic deformation; grain size reduction did not significantly modify the olivine CPO. This illustrates how a CPO can be preserved though an entire metamorphic cycle, including hydration, dehydration, and deformation processes, and that the CPO and the microstructures (e.g. grain shape) of one phase do not necessarily record the same event.

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Acknowledgements

This project has been supported by the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/under REA-Grant Agreement No. 608001, “ABYSS”, and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the ERC Advanced Grant Agreement No. 669972, “Disequilibirum Metamorphism” (“DIME”), to BJ. The authors thank Fabrice Barou for assistance with the EBSD data acquisition, Christophe Nevado and Doriane Delmas for the high-quality thin section polishing, and José Alberto Padrón-Navarta and Julien Gasc for helpful discussions. Comments by Luiz Morales and an anonymous reviewer were greatly appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Physics of Geological Processes (PGP), University of Oslo, Blindern, P.O. Box 1048, 0136, Oslo, Norway

    Kristina G. Dunkel, Håkon Austrheim & Bjørn Jamtveit

  2. Géosciences Montpellier, CNRS and Université Montpellier, 34095, Montpellier, France

    Benoit Ildefonse

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  1. Kristina G. Dunkel
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  2. Håkon Austrheim
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  3. Benoit Ildefonse
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  4. Bjørn Jamtveit
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Correspondence to Kristina G. Dunkel.

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Communicated by Jochen Hoefs.

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410_2017_1378_MOESM1_ESM.jpg

O nline Resource 1 Optical micrographs taken with plane polarised (a) and cross-polarised (b) light showing microstructural domains B, C, and D and a displacement of chromite grains in domains C and D (JPEG 3820 kb)

410_2017_1378_MOESM2_ESM.png

Online Resource 2 Olivine grain size distributions for domains A to C. Two-dimensional grain sizes were computed from EBSD data using MTEX and the three-dimensional distributions were calculated with the Saltykov method (as described in Lopez-Sanchez and Llana-Fúnez, 2015) using the GrainSizeTools script by Lopez-Sanchez (2016). The steps in the volume-weighted cumulative distribution at high diameters in domains A and C are caused by isolated porphyroclasts (in A) or relict coarse grains (in C) because the measured areas are relatively small (PNG 219 kb)

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Dunkel, K.G., Austrheim, H., Ildefonse, B. et al. Transfer of olivine crystallographic orientation through a cycle of serpentinisation and dehydration. Contrib Mineral Petrol 172, 64 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00410-017-1378-5

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