Determination of cooling rates of glasses over four orders of magnitude

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Volcanic materials can experience up to eleven orders of magnitude of cooling rate (qc) starting from 10–5 K s−1. The glassy component of volcanic material is routinely measured via differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) to obtain qc through the determination of the glass fictive temperature (Tf). Conventional DSC (C-DSC), which has been employed for decades, can only access a relatively small range of qc (from ~ 10–2 to ~ 1 K s−1). Therefore, extrapolations up to six orders of magnitude of C-DSC data are necessary to derive qc of glasses quenched both at extremely low and high qc. Here, we test the reliability of such extrapolations by combining C-DSC with the recently introduced flash calorimetry (F-DSC). F-DSC enables to extend the qc exploration up to 104 K s−1. We use three synthetic glasses as analogs of volcanic melts. We first apply a normalization procedure of heat flow data for both C-DSC and F-DSC to derive Tf as a function of experimental qc, following the “unified area-matching” approach. The obtained Tf–qc relationship shows that Arrhenius models, widely adopted in previous studies, are only valid for qc determination within the calibration range. In contrast, a non-Arrhenius model better captures qc values, especially when a significant extrapolation is required. We, therefore, present a practical “how-to” protocol for estimating qc using DSC.