A magmatic mush column rosetta stone: The McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica

Abstract

A long‐running mystery of Earth science concerns the physical and dynamic connection between volcanism, plutonism, magma chambers, layered intrusions, and the production from mantle material of oceanic and continental crust. The basic chemical connection of fractionating melt from crystals and resorting crystals again and again is clear, but volcanologists and plutonists covet almost mutually exclusive, process‐oriented sciences to explain the compositional sequences and textures found in stacks of lavas and expanses of plutons.Lavas present an extensive time series of quenched aliquots of magma without any clear measure of the evolutionary spatial context of sampling within the magmatic system. Plutons offer extensive spatial context without a clear physical connection to the greater active magmatic system and without a sequential capturing of time; critical original textural details are erased under long cooldown times. A deadly middle ground must be crossed to meld the timescales and textures captured by volcanism with the spatial scales and textural processes of plutonism into a conceptual representation of an integrated working magmatic system.