Seafloor Alteration Governed by Oceanic Crustal Age and Redox
Conditions: Insights from Machine Learning-based Elemental Transfer
Analyses
Abstract
Newly formed oceanic crust interacts with penetrating seawater,
resulting in the formation of secondary minerals. Sediment cover can
potentially change the redox conditions of underlying basaltic crusts,
significantly affecting the types of secondary minerals and element
transfer during alteration. However, previous studies have not revealed
the quantitative regional variation and controlling factors of seafloor
alteration using altered samples taken from different sites. We present
a novel approach for the quantitative analyses of element mobility
related to seafloor alteration based on a regional dataset of altered
basalt bulk compositions and highlights the effects of the redox state
and duration on alteration. The protolith reconstruction models (PRMs),
machine learning-based element mobility analyses, were applied to the
compositional data of the basaltic crusts from the South/Northwest
Pacific region. The analyses revealed that altered basalts with older
ages showed higher element mobility, particularly characterized by an
enrichment of Rb and K, which were associated by up to 100 times with
the formation of secondary minerals. In the oxidative settings of the
South Pacific region, enrichment of Ba, U, and Pb and depletion of P
were observed in samples with intense alteration. In contrast, under
reductive conditions in the Northwest Pacific region, alterations
associated with carbonate veins caused U enrichment. Our research
suggests that sediment thickness is a key factor in the redox conditions
during alteration, which changes the characteristics of element transfer
and secondary minerals. Additionally, seafloor alteration likely
persisted for at least 30 Myr, irrespective of whether the environment
was oxidative or reductive.