Evolution of a small intraplate basaltic lava field: Jerrabattgulla Creek, upper Shoalhaven River catchment, southeast New South Wales

Abstract

The Jerrabattgulla Creek basalts are in the upper catchment of the Shoalhaven River of southeastern New South Wales. The basalts erupted into a narrow, north-draining valley and modified the local drainage system, re-routing the paleo-Jerrabattgulla Creek, preserving a series of sub-basaltic quartzose gravels with silcretes in the paleovalley. The paleovalley indicates that a north-flowing drainage existed in this place in the Miocene. The high-relief, narrow valley has preserved a volcanic stratigraphy allowing the magmatic evolution of this small lava field to be determined. The lavas have a large compositional range from olivine nephelinite through to quartz tholeiite, which is unusual in such a small lava field. They represent three distinct magma batches, most likely from an amphibole–apatite metasomatised sub-continental lithospheric mantle, and underwent fractional crystallisation of olivine, clinopyroxene and plagioclase and assimilated upper crust. The lava field underwent temporal change from dominantly alkaline, to mixed alkaline and subalkaline, to dominantly alkaline magmatism over the course of its evolution.