Geochemical characterization of alchichica maar volcano, Serdán-oriental Basin, eastern Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt: Insights on polymagmatic evolution at monogenetic volcanic clusters

Abstract

Monogenetic volcanic fields usually comprise short-lived isolated volcanoes. However, new vents might build over or near to the older ones, resulting in the construction of complex, compound, nested, or overlapping volcanic structures formed by the superposition of individual monogenetic edifices. In the present study, we examine the case of Alchichica Maar volcano that cut through a series of pre-volcanic materials, including sheets of lava flows, pyroclastic deposits, paleosols, and scoria cone deposits. Major and trace elements are used to characterize geochemically each of the different pre-maar and maar units that integrate the Alchichica volcano, allowing to investigate the source composition, syn-eruptive, and crustal magmatic processes and the genetic relationship between the Alchichica maar and the underlying volcanic rocks. Typical lithologies are medium-K calc-alkaline rocks, including basaltic andesites for the lava flow and the scoria cone, and basalts for the maar units and the pre-maar pyroclastic unit. They also present slight variations in La/Sm, Ba/La, Zr/Nb, Ce/Yb, Ce/Pb, and Dy/Yb ratios suggesting different petrological processes such as variable amounts of partial melting in a heterogeneous spinel mantle, fractional crystallization, and crustal contamination during magma ascent. Our results reveal a polymagmatic activity, with different magma batches fed the pre-maar and the maar eruptions. They also allowed depict and confirm a time gap between the eruptive phases of the Alchichica maar formation, which is an add on the polycyclic character of the phreatomagmatic volcanism at this maar and previously described with the volcanostratigraphy examination. In addition, we conclude that the Alchichica maar cannot be defined as a polygenetic volcano; instead, it forms part of a cluster of Late Pleistocene to Holocene overlapped monogenetic volcanoes.