Partial melting and recrystallization of Archeaan komatiites by residual heat from rapidly accumulated flows

Abstract

Spinifex-textured komatiites at Honeymoon Well, Western Australia, show evidence of partial melting and recrystallization of original igneous textures. Their textures and mineral compositions differ markedly from those typical of komatiites. Spinifex olivine plates are bent and broken, while interstitial space between spinifex and cumulus olivine is occupied by polygonal aggregates of clinopyroxene, orthopyroxene, minor olivine and plagioclase. Similar granular pyroxene-plagioclase aggregates occur as diffuse veins cutting spinifex zones and cumulate zones of the flows and, in places, form the matrix to a breccia containing corroded fragments of spinifex rock. Thermometry based on the two pyroxene assemblages yields temperatures of 1055° to 1141° C, just below the low-pressure komatiite solidus. Mineral compositions are different from those of typical komatiites: clinopyroxenes are Al-poor and Cr-rich, olivines are unusually iron-rich and depleted in Cr and Ca, and the low-Ca pyroxene is bronzite rather than the more typical pigeonite. We interpret these observations as the results of thermal metamorphism, partial remelting and subsequent slow crystallization of originally normal spinifex-textured komatiite flows. The rocks in question occupy a 40–70 m interval sandwiched between two olivine-rich units: an underlying 90 m-thick olivine adcumulate layer, forming part of the cumulate zone of a basal 160 m-thick flow, and an overlying 1 km-thick extrusive body composed mostly of olivine mesocumulate and adcumulate and capped in turn by spinifex-textured flows. Thermal modelling shows that a sinusoidal temperature profile of cool flow tops and hot flow centres would exist within this sequence shortly after eruption. Conductive thermal relaxation of this profile could reheat spinifex zones to the extent of inducing partial melting and textural reconstitution. Such reheating is largely dependent on the time interval between the emplacement of successive flows. Calculations suggest that at Honeymoon Well the emplacement interval must have been of the order of 10 years or less. Textural reconstitution may have contributed to the development of the thick orthocumulate sequences characteristic of komatiites in the Agnew-Wiluna belt.