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Petrographic and geochemical characteristics of the granitic basement rocks below Deccan Traps obtained from scientific drilling to 3014 m depth in the Koyna region, western India

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Abstract

The composition of the Precambrian granitic basement below a few hundred to a few thousand meters of the Deccan Traps in western and central India remain poorly characterized, essentially due to lack of samples for laboratory analyses. In the present work, petrographic and geochemical characteristics of the basement granitoids from the Koyna region of western India have been studied through core samples and cuttings made available from the scientific drilling to the depth of 3014 m. The basement rock comprises dominantly of granite, granitic gneiss and tonalite. The major minerals are quartz, plagioclase and orthoclase, whereas the minor minerals include epidote, chlorite and hornblende. In the feldspar and quartz grains, signatures of brittle deformation, as well as shearing effects, are observed. Also, fractures and joints are noticed frequently throughout the basement rock with possibilities of more than one dominant stress direction during fracturing. Below 1100 m depth in the western and 1300 m depth in the eastern side of the Western Ghats escarpment, the basement cores are weakly foliated as well as sheared due to tectonic deformation. The bulk rock geochemistry of the basement granitoids shows range from tholeiitic to calc-alkaline series of magma types which mainly belong to adamellite–granodiorite–tonalite suites. The basement rocks are predominantly peraluminous in nature and have an overall predominance of sodium over potassium. Fractionated REE patterns with enriched light REE (LREE) and depleted heavy REE (HREE) along with a small negative Eu-anomaly are observed in the samples. Overall, the Precambrian basement rocks are lithologically heterogeneous and apparently genetically related by fractional crystallization and partially derived from magmas.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Government of India, for his kind support. Geochemical data were acquired using the facilities at Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences (BSIP), Lucknow. We are grateful to Dr Anupam Sharma, Ishwar Chandra Rahi and Amrit Pal Singh Chaddha of BSIP for their help during laboratory analyses. Assistance provided by Dr Kunal Modak, Manish Srivastava, Digant Vyas and Dinesh Nikalje during geological logging, sampling and preparation of thin sections is sincerely acknowledged. The manuscript has benefited from constructive suggestions by two anonymous reviewers.

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  1. Ministry of Earth Sciences, Borehole Geophysics Research Laboratory, Karad, 415 105, India

    Matsyendra Kumar Shukla, C S Vishnu & Sukanta Roy

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  1. Matsyendra Kumar Shukla
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  2. C S Vishnu
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Contributions

Matsyendra Kumar Shukla: Conceptualization, geochemical data acquisition and analysis, preparation of map, litholog, graphs and charts, writing original draft; Vishnu C S: Petrography, megascopic analysis and editing; and Sukanta Roy: Review and editing.

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Correspondence to Matsyendra Kumar Shukla.

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Communicated by Jyotisankar Ray

This article is part of the Topical Collection: Deccan Traps and other Flood Basalt Provinces – Recent Research Trends.

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Shukla, M.K., Vishnu, C.S. & Roy, S. Petrographic and geochemical characteristics of the granitic basement rocks below Deccan Traps obtained from scientific drilling to 3014 m depth in the Koyna region, western India. J Earth Syst Sci 131, 132 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-022-01888-z

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