Coupled petrological-geodynamical modeling of a compositionally heterogeneous mantle plume

Abstract Self-consistent geodynamic modeling that includes melting is challenging as the chemistry of the source rocks continuously changes as a result of melt extraction. Here, we describe a new method to study the interaction between physical and chemical processes in an uprising heterogeneous mantle plume by combining a geodynamic code with a thermodynamic modeling approach for magma generation and evolution. We pre-computed hundreds of phase diagrams, each of them for a different chemical system. After melt is extracted, the phase diagram with the closest bulk rock chemistry to the depleted source rock is updated locally. The petrological evolution of rocks is tracked via evolving chemi…

Hydrothermal alteration can result in pore pressurization and volcano instability

AbstractThe collapse of a volcanic flank can be destructive and deadly. Hydrothermal alteration is common to volcanoes worldwide and is thought to promote volcano instability by decreasing rock strength. However, some laboratory studies have shown that not all alteration reduces rock strength. Our new laboratory data for altered rhyodacites from Chaos Crags (Lassen volcanic center, California, USA) show that pore- and crack-filling mineral precipitation can reduce porosity and permeability and increase strength, Young's modulus, and cohesion. A significant reduction in permeability, by as much as four orders of magnitude, will inhibit fluid circulation and create zones of high pore fluid pr…

Alteration-Induced Volcano Instability at La Soufrière de Guadeloupe (Eastern Caribbean)

International audience; Volcanoes are unstable structures that deform laterally and frequently experience mass wasting events. Hydrothermal alteration is often invoked as a mechanism that contributes significantly to volcano instability. We present a study that combines laboratory experiments, geophysical data, and large-scale numerical modeling to better understand the influence of alteration on volcano stability, using La Soufrière de Guadeloupe (Eastern Caribbean) as a case study. Laboratory experiments on variably altered (advanced argillic alteration) blocks show that uniaxial compressive strength, Young's modulus, and cohesion decrease as a function of increasing alteration, but that …

Constraining effective rheology through parallel joint geodynamic inversion

Abstract The dynamics of crust and lithosphere is to a large extent controlled by its effective viscosity. Unfortunately, extrapolation of laboratory experiments indicates that viscosity is likely to vary over many orders of magnitude. Additional methods are thus required to constrain the effective viscosity of the present-day lithosphere using more direct geophysical observations. Here we discuss a method, which couples 3D geodynamic models with observations (surface velocities and gravity anomalies) and with a Bayesian inversion scheme on massively parallel high performance computers. We illustrate that the basic principle of a joint geodynamic and gravity inversion works well with a simp…

Insights into the compositional evolution of crustal magmatic systems from coupled petrological-geodynamical models

Funding was provided by the VAMOS Research Center, University of Mainz (Germany) and by the ERC Consolidator Grant MAGMA (project #771143). The evolution of crustal magmatic systems is incompletely understood, as most studies are limited either by their temporal or spatial resolution. Exposed plutonic rocks represent the final stage of a long-term evolution punctuated by several magmatic events with different chemistry and generated under different mechanical conditions. Although the final state can be easily described, the nature of each magmatic pulse is more difficult to retrieve. This study presents a new method to investigate the compositional evolution of plutonic systems while consid…

Appraisal of geodynamic inversion results: a data mining approach

Abstract Bayesian sampling based inversions require many thousands or even millions of forward models, depending on how nonlinear or non-unique the inverse problem is, and how many unknowns are involved. The result of such a probabilistic inversion is not a single ‘best-fit’ model, but rather a probability distribution that is represented by the entire model ensemble. Often, a geophysical inverse problem is non-unique, and the corresponding posterior distribution is multimodal, meaning that the distribution consists of clusters with similar models that represent the observations equally well. In these cases, we would like to visualize the characteristic model properties within each of these…

An autonomous petrological database for geodynamic simulations of magmatic systems

SUMMARY Self-consistent modelling of magmatic systems is challenging as the melt continuously changes its chemical composition upon crystallization, which may affect the mechanical behaviour of the system. Melt extraction and subsequent crystallization create new rocks while depleting the source region. As the chemistry of the source rocks changes locally due to melt extraction, new calculations of the stable phase assemblages are required to track the rock evolution and the accompanied change in density. As a consequence, a large number of isochemical sections of stable phase assemblages are required to study the evolution of magmatic systems in detail. As the state-of-the-art melting diag…

Geodynamic Modeling with Uncertain Initial Geometries

Trunk Packing Revisited

For trunk packing problems only few approximation schemes are known, mostly designed for the European standard DIN 70020 [6] with equally sized boxes [8, 9, 11, 12]. In this paper two discretized approaches for the US standard SAE J1100 [10] are presented, which make use of different box sizes. An exact branch-and-bound algorithm for weighted independent sets on graphs is given, using the special structure of the SAE standard. Another branch-and-bound packing algorithm using linear programs is presented. With these algorithms axis-oriented packings of different box sizes in an arbitrary trunk geometry can be computed efficiently.

3D Numerical Modelling of Salt Tectonics

Summary Many factors have been suggested to affect the development of salt structures, including sedimentation, brittle sediment deformation, multiple tectonic events and basement topography. To unravel the relative importance of these processes, we performed high resolution 2D and 3D thermo-mechanical simulations that take these factors into account, while incorporating nonlinear salt creep laws and visco-elasto-plastic rock properties. Simulations show that the sedimentation rate affects both the speed with which structures form, and the spacing between the salt structures, which is larger for higher rates. Consistent with earlier sandbox experiments, we find that there is a feedback betw…

Rapid laccolith intrusion driven by explosive volcanic eruption

Magmatic intrusions and volcanic eruptions are intimately related phenomena. Shallow magma intrusion builds subsurface reservoirs that are drained by volcanic eruptions. Thus, the long-held view is that intrusions must precede and feed eruptions. Here we show that explosive eruptions can also cause magma intrusion. We provide an account of a rapidly emplaced laccolith during the 2011 rhyolite eruption of Cordón Caulle, Chile. Remote sensing indicates that an intrusion began after eruption onset and caused severe (>200 m) uplift over 1 month. Digital terrain models resolve a laccolith-shaped body ∼0.8 km3. Deformation and conduit flow models indicate laccolith depths of only ∼20–200 m and ov…

Geodynamic inversion to constrain the non-linear rheology of the lithosphere

A common method to determine the strength of the lithosphere is through estimating its effective elastic thickness from the coherence between gravity and topography. This method assumes a priori that the lithosphere is a thin elastic plate floating on a viscous mantle. Whereas this seems to work well with oceanic plates, it has given controversial results in continental collision zones. Usually, continental collisions zones are well-studied areas for which additional geophysical datasets such as receiver functions and seismic tomography exist that constrain the geometry of the lithosphere and often show that it is rather complex. Yet, lithospheric geometry by itself is insufficient to under…

geomIO: An Open‐Source MATLAB Toolbox to Create the Initial Configuration of 2‐D/3‐D Thermo‐Mechanical Simulations From 2‐D Vector Drawings

Creating the initial geometry and temperature configuration of 3D numerical simulations is a challenging task. Professional tools are expensive. They often have a steep learning curve and do mostly not interface with the numerical simulation software used by the geodynamics and tectonics academic community. There, we developed geomIO (geometry Input/Output), a MATLAB toolbox to create the initial configuration of geological models regarding model geometry and temperature structure. geomIO allows users to create a geo-referenced 3D volume by drawing multiple 2D cross-sections in a standard vector graphics editor. The volume is then used to assign material properties and set up initial temper…