Hydration State of the Upper Mantle in the Arc-Extended Backarc of
Southern Cascadia and the Great Basin, western U.S., from
Magnetotellurics
Abstract
The distribution of water in the upper mantle is believed to have strong
influence upon global dynamics by influencing mantle rheology, modal
mineralogy, melting systematics and chemical differentiation. The
principal input of water is the process of subduction which is estimated
to have introduced several ocean volumes to the mantle over Earth
history. In principal, a large proportion of this water may be dissolved
in the nominally anhydrous silicate minerals (NAMs), but quantifying
this has been challenging. Xenoliths only sample the upper 200 km, less
mostly, and suffer concern about alteration on the way to emplacement.
Recent laboratory data show that seismic velocity is not sensitive to
intracrystalline hydration. However, electrical conductivity is strongly
sensitive and could provide estimates of mineral water content with
suitable constraints. An 1300 km E-W transect of ~400
magnetotelluric (MT) soundings spanning the period range 0.01 to 17,480
s has been acquired from the northern California coast over the Gorda
plate, across the Great Basin of Nevada and western Utah, and spanning
most of the Colorado Plateau of eastern Utah. Regularized 2D inversion
reveals an upper mantle whose resistivity below the broad Great Basin
falls progressively with depth from values of ~100 ohm-m
near 50 km to <10 ohm-m by 400 km depth. We test the
hypothesis that the vertical resistivity profile is consistent with the
maximal hydration degree allowed by ambient T-P short of triggering
H2O-undersaturated melting (cf. Ardia, 2012, EPSL). An obvious possible
source of hydration would be the Gorda, and to some extent the prior
Farallon, subducting plates. Assuming standard and enhanced adiabats,
deep resistivity profiles predicted using lab data of Novella (2017, Sci
Rpts) suggest only resistivities in the near ‘hanging wall’ of the Gorda
subduction zone under northwestern Nevada are low enough to represent
full NAMs hydration. Under the central (eastern Nevada) and eastern
(western Utah) Great Basin, large-scale resistivities are 2-3x too high,
nominally. However, channelization of fluid upward from the plate could
mean a mixed saturated-unsaturated peridotite upper mantle. Support has
been from U.S. Dept of Energy contract DE-0006732 and National Science
Foundation grants EAR-0838043 and OPP-1443532, and numerous prior.