Alkaline volcanism in the history of the Norwegian-Greenland basin

Abstract

The opening of the North Atlantic Ocean began in the Late Paleocene and was accompanied by the eruption of submarine and subaerial basalts, which built up submarine plateau and ridges, islands, and volcanoes. The volcanic rocks are dominated by low-K tholeiitic basalts, which associate with almost coeval alkaline rocks (subalkali and alkali basalts and their derivatives, basanites, nephelinites, and others). The oldest alkaline volcanics (58–56 Ma) were formed during the opening of the oceanic rift at its shoulders, in northeastern Greenland and the western Norwegian shelf. It was recently found that 55–53 Ma-old alkali-ultramafic rocks are much more widespread at the eastern coast of Greenland than it was previously thought. The younger occurrences of alkali volcanism with pulses at 30, 10, 5 Ma, and up to the present day were formed on the young oceanic plate and newly formed islands and seamounts. To compare the oceanic and continental volcanism of this region, oceanic volcanics dredged during Cruise 10 of the R/V Akademik Kurchatov were reanalyzed using modern analytical methods (XRF and ICP-MS). This study showed that the oceanic and continental alkaline rocks are significantly different in petrochemical and geochemical characteristics, which is caused by differences in magma generation depths and compositions of the mantle source material. The primary continental alkaline magmas were initially more enriched in incompatible trace elements than oceanic ones. During the shallow-level differentiation of oceanic magmas, trace elements and alkalis could be accumulated in residual melts, but these processes occurred on a minor scale and depended on tectonic conditions.