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Mineral fish: their morphological classification, usefulness as shear sense indicators and genesis

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Abstract

Mineral fish are sheared and commonly asymmetric mineral grains or clusters of grains. This work reports 11 sub-types of mineral fish showing a top-to-SE sense of ductile shearing in the Karakoram Metamorphic Complex (KMC). The mineral fish are of three broad geometries: sigmoid, lenticular and parallelogram. Reliable senses of shear are indicated by the overall asymmetry and inclination of mineral fish. On the other hand, the true shear sense is not always indicated by either the orientations of their cleavage planes or those of the individual grains in composite mineral fish. The ranges of local orientations of single sigmoid mineral fish that include the lower values (<23°) in the KMC indicate their extensive ductile shearing. The studied mineral fish were products of a range of deformation mechanisms including homogeneous deformation, simple shear, intra-granular slip, crystal-plastic deformation, fracturing and synthetic shearing. Additionally, some examples might have undergone duplex slips and a few nucleated and grew either prior to or during the top-to-SE shearing.

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Acknowledgments

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay’s Seed Grant: Spons/GS/SM-1/2009 supported this work. Geology students (2002–2007) at IIT Roorkee taught me microstructures when I was their Teaching Assistant. Ramananda Chakrabarti (Harvard University), Sidhartha Bhattacharyya (Alabama University), Arundhuti Ghatak (Rochester University) and Pritam Nasipuri (Universitetet i Tromsø) constantly updated me on microstructures. Emeritus Professor Christopher J. Talbot (Uppsala University) is heartily thanked for going through different versions of the script as an ‘internal reviewer’, for his geologic and linguistic inputs and for suggesting a more appropriate term ‘internal fish’ in place of ‘swallowed fish’. Mary Leech (San Francisco State University) and Richard Norris (University of Otago) are gratefully acknowledged for insightful reviews, which led to significantly fine tune the manuscript. Richard’s comments prompted me to revise the mineral fish classification presented here and be extremely cautious in using parallelogram-shaped grains as shear sense indicators. Teaching Assistant Nayani Das (IIT Bombay) reformatted some of the line diagrams. Springer team’s intense proof-reading is appreciated.

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  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 400 076, Maharashtra, India

    Soumyajit Mukherjee

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Mukherjee, S. Mineral fish: their morphological classification, usefulness as shear sense indicators and genesis. Int J Earth Sci (Geol Rundsch) 100, 1303–1314 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00531-010-0535-0

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