Iridium content of basaltic tuffs and enclosing black shales of the balder formation, North Sea

Abstract

The anomalous levels of Ir and the presence of shocked metamorphosed quartz deposited at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary worldwide is strong evidence that a meteorite impact took place during the K/T boundary interval. However, because of observed high Ir contents at Kilauea vents, it is still a major point of contention that the Ir anomaly could have been produced by flood basaltic volcanism. This might especially be true at Stevns Klint, Denmark, where the K/T boundary marl contains pyroclastic labradorite and Mg-smectite thought to have been produced by basaltic volcanism. However, up to now, no study has determined whether or not a depositional Ir anomaly has formed in association with a known major basaltic eruption. Herein, we report the concentrations of Ir, Pt, Au, and Ag in basaltic tuffs and enclosing marine black shales of the widespread Paleocene-Eocene Balder Formation. The tuffs in the Balder Formation represent explosive basaltic volcanism associated with the major volcano/tectonic activity of the opening of the northern North Atlantic Ocean. As such, they are the kind of eruption that could have possibly created a global K/T boundary-type Ir anomaly. Our results show that the tuffs and the shales on a per-weight basis both contain concentrations of Ir (0.1–0.25 ppb) that are higher than the Ir levels recently measured from terrestrial rocks including the Deccan Trap and Columbia River flood basalts, but are comparable to Hawaiian and Reunion Island basalts. Because of its thickness, the absolute amount of Ir expelled during the eruption of the main tuff sequence of the Balder Tuff is sizable. Yet for such an eruption to have produced a global Ir anomaly would mandate it having been one of an extremely high volatile content and it would have to have been erupted over a very short interval of time. Furthermore, such a high proportion of the volatilized Ir would have to have been injected into the stratosphere so that only small enrichments of Ir were formed in the proximal tuffs on a per gram basis.