Evidence for the return of subducted continental crust

Author Posting. © Nature Publishing Group, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Nature 448 (2007): 684-687, doi:10.1038/nature06048.Substantial quantities of terrigenous sediments are known to enter the mantle at subduction zones, but little is known about their fate in the mantle. Subducted sediment may be entrained in buoyantly upwelling plumes and returned to the earth’s surface at hotspots, but the proportion of recycled sediment in the mantle is small and clear examples of recycled sediment in hotspot lavas are rare. We report here remarkably enriched 87Sr/86Sr and 143Nd/144Nd isotope signatures (up to 0.720830 and 0.512285, respectively) in Samoan lavas from three dredge locations on the underwater flanks of Savai’i island, Western Samoa. The submarine Savai’i lavas represent the most extreme 87Sr/86Sr isotope compositions reported for ocean island basalts (OIBs) to date. The data are consistent with the presence of a recycled sediment component (with a composition similar to upper continental crust, or UCC) in the Samoan mantle. Trace element data show similar affinities with UCC—including exceptionally low Ce/Pb and Nb/U ratios—that complement the enriched 87Sr/86Sr and 143Nd/144Nd isotope signatures. The geochemical evidence from the new Samoan lavas radically redefines the composition of the EM2 (enriched mantle 2) mantle endmember, and points to the presence of an ancient recycled UCC component in the Samoan plume

An extraterrestrial trigger for the Early Cretaceous massive volcanism? Evidence from the paleo-Tethys Ocean

The Early Cretaceous Greater Ontong Java Event in the Pacific Ocean may have covered ca. 1% of the Earth's surface with volcanism. It has puzzled scientists trying to explain its origin by several mechanisms possible on Earth, leading others to propose an extraterrestrial trigger to explain this event. A large oceanic extraterrestrial impact causing such voluminous volcanism may have traces of its distal ejecta in sedimentary rocks around the basin, including the paleo-Tethys Ocean which was then contiguous with the Pacific Ocean. The contemporaneous marine sequence at central Italy, containing the sedimentary expression of a global oceanic anoxic event (OAE1a), may have recorded such ocurrence as indicated by two stratigraphic intervals with 187Os/188Os indicative of meteoritic influence. Here we show, for the first time, that platinum group element abundances and inter-element ratios in this paleo-Tethyan marine sequence provide no evidence for an extraterrestrial trigger for the Early Cretaceous massive volcanism

Pre-eruptive magmatic processes re-timed using a non-isothermal approach to magma chamber dynamics

Open Source PaperThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The attached file is the published version of the article

Hints of Universality from Inflection Point Inflation

This work aims to understand how cosmic inflation embeds into larger models of particle physics and string theory. Our work operates within a weakened version of the Landscape paradigm, wherein it is assumed that the set of possible Lagrangians is vast enough to admit the notion of a generic model. By focusing on slow-roll inflation, we examine the roles of both the scalar potential and the space of couplings which determine its precise form. In particular, we focus on the structural properties of the scalar potential, and find a surprising result: inflection point inflation emerges as an important —and under certain assumptions, dominant — possibility in the context of generic scalar potentials. We begin by a systematic coarse graining over the set of possible inflection point inflation models using V.I. Arnold’s ADE classification of singularities. Similar to du Val’s pioneering work on surface singularities, these determine structural classes for inflection point inflation which depened on a distinct number of control parameters. We consider both single and multifield inflation, and show how the various structural classes embed within each other. We also show how such control parameters influence the larger physical models in to which inflation is embedded. These techniques are then applied to both MSSM inflation and KKLT-type models of string cosmology. In the former case, we find that the scale of inflation can be entirely encoded within the super- potential of supersymmetric quantum field theories. We show how this relieves the fine-tuning required in such models by upwards of twelve orders of magnitude. Moreover, unnatural tuning between SUSY breaking and SUSY preserving sectors is eliminated without the explicit need for any hidden sector dynamics. In the later case, we discuss how structural stability vastly generalizes — and addresses — the Kallosh-Linde problem. Implications for the spectrum of SUSY breaking soft terms are then discussed, with an emphasis on how they may assist in constraining the inflationary scalar potential. We then pivot to a general discussion of the FLRW-scalar phase space, and show how inflection points induce caustics — or dynamical fixed points — amongst the space of possible trajectories. These fixed points are then used to argue that for uninformative priors on the space of couplings, the likelihood of inflection point inflation scales with the inverse cube of the number of e-foldings. We point out the geometric origin for the known ambiguity in the Liouville measure, and demonstrate of inflection point inflation ameliorates this problem. Finally we investigate the effect of the fixed point structure on the spectrum of density perturbations. We show how an anomaly in the Cosmic Mircowave Background data — low power at large scales — can be explained as a by product of the fixed point dynamics

water chemistry are new challenges possible from coda compositional data analysis point of view

John Aitchison died in December 2016 leaving behind an important inheritance: to continue to explore the fascinating world of compositional data. However, notwithstanding the progress that we have made in this field of investigation and the diffusion of the CoDA theory in different researches, a lot of work has still to be done, particularly in geochemistry. In fact most of the papers published in international journals that manage compositional data ignore their nature and their consequent peculiar statistical properties. On the other hand, when CoDA principles are applied, several efforts are often made to continue to consider the log-ratio transformed variables, for example the centered log-ratio ones, as the original ones, demonstrating a sort of resistance to thinking in relative terms. This appears to be a very strange behavior since geochemists are used to ratios and their analysis is the base of the experimental calibration when standards are evolved to set the instruments. In this chapter some challenges are presented by exploring water chemistry data with the aim to invite people to capture the essence of thinking in a relative and multivariate way since this is the path to obtain a description of natural processes as complete as possible

Resolving crystallisation ages of Archean mafic-ultramafic rocks using the Re-Os isotope system

Rhenium-Osmium (Re-Os) isotope and elemental data are presented for mafic-ultramafic rocks from the central region of the Lewisian Archean terrain in northwest Scotland. These results give a best estimate for the time of emplacement of the mafic-ultramafic bodies of 2686.7 ± 14.7 Myr (2σ). The initial 187Os/188Os isotope ratio of 0.10940 ± 0.00076 indicates that such material possessed a chondritic Os isotope composition, which suggests that these rocks were formed by direct melting of mantle material, consistent with major and trace element constraints on their formation. Nevertheless, the Re-Os systematics of some of the mafic-ultramafic rocks in the Lewisian have been significantly disturbed, such that the original age information has been lost. These rocks lie on a regression line that defines an age of ~ 3260 Myr, and a negative initial Os isotope composition, suggesting perturbation of the Re-Os system, either through assimilation or post-emplacement elemental exchange. Such a process also appears to have affected the Sm-Nd systematics in the same samples. Crustal assimilation can account for the observed Os and Nd isotope variations but only if the assimilated material possessed 187Os/188Os values of ca. 25 at ~ 2687 Myr. In contrast, the surrounding gneisses and metasediments preserve present-day measured 187Os/188Os values of between 3 and 16. Rather, the spatial variation of initial Os and Nd isotope compositions suggests that isotope perturbation was caused by local sub-solidus element exchange between different lithologies, consistent with major element data and petrographic observations. Taken together, these results highlight the utility of the Re-Os isotope system for obtaining precise ages for Archean mafic-ultramafic rocks, and as a sensitive petrogenetic tracer capable of discriminating between assimilation or elemental exchange. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

Correlated Os-Pb-Nd-Sr isotopes in the Austral-Cook chain basalts: the nature of mantle components in plume sources

Osmium (Os), strontium (Sr), neodymium (Nd) and lead (Pb) isotopes have been measured on a suite of aphyric basalts from 12 islands of the Austral-Cook island archipelago, an area which exhibits a range in Pb isotope compositions that encompasses almost the entire range displayed by ocean island basalts (OIB). Although the samples have Os concentrations (1.69-34.80 ppt) at the lower end of the range measured for OIB, they display a range of initial 187Os/ 188Os ratios (between 0.1279 and 0.1594) similar to that defined by olivine-phyric, Os-rich OIB. Positive Os-Nd, Os-Pb and negative Os-Sr isotope correlations are documented, indicating that the isotopic arrays represent various proportions of mixing between a HIMU-type end-member represented by Mangaia and Tubuai islands and characterized by radiogenic Os and Pb isotopic compositions, and an end-member represented by Rarotonga island which is characterized by unradiogenic Os and intermediate Sr, Nd and Pb isotopic compositions. The HIMU signature of the mantle component involved in Tubuai-Mangaia mantle sources requires long-term enrichments of U and Th relative to Pb and Re relative to Os, without associated increase in Rb/Sr, that are consistent with recycled oceanic crust. The end-member represented by Rarotonga basalts shows Os, Sr, Nd, and Pb isotopic signatures similar to those presumed for the 'bulk silicate earth' (BSE), which cannot be obtained by mixing the four mantle components (DMM, HIMU and EMI and 2) generally used to circumscribe the Sr-Nd-Pb isotopic data of OIB. The primitive-like isotopic characters of this end-member might be ascribed to the presence of undepleted material from a lower segment of the mantle in the source of the Austral-Cook island basalts (and more specifically Rarotonga basalts); however, such a hypothesis is challenged by both the absence of a primordial 3He signature and the non-primitive Ce/Pb and Nb/U values for the Austral-Cook island basalts. Alternatively, assuming that the primitive-like isotopic composition of the Rarotonga samples reflects mixing proportions between the HIMU component and a mantle component characterized by unradiogenic Os, Nd and Pb and radiogenic Sr isotopic composition relative to BSE, the involvement of recycled, old subcontinental lithosphere in the genesis of this component should then be considered. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved