Magnesium isotope fractionation by chemical diffusion in natural settings and in laboratory analogues

Abstract

Laboratory experiments are used to document isotopic fractionation of magnesium by chemical diffusion in a silicate melt and the results compared to the magnesium isotopic composition across contacts between igneous rocks of different composition in natural settings. The natural samples are from transects from felsic to mafic rocks at Vinal Cove in the Vinalhaven Intrusive Complex, Maine and from the Aztec Wash pluton in Nevada. Two laboratory diffusion couples made by juxtaposing melts made from powders of the felsic and mafic compositions sampled at Vinal Cove were annealed at about 1500°C for 22.5 and 10h, respectively. The transport of magnesium in the diffusion couples resulted in easily measured magnesium isotopic fractionations at the interface (δ26Mg∼1.5‰). These isotopic fractionations provide a distinctive isotopic “fingerprint” that we use to determine whether chemical gradients in natural settings where melts of different composition were juxtaposed were due to chemical diffusion. The magnesium isotopic fractionation along one profile at Vinal Cove is exactly what one would expect based on the fractionations found in the laboratory experiments. This is an important result in that it shows that the isotope fractionation by chemical diffusion found in highly controlled laboratory experiments can be found in a natural setting. This correspondence implies that chemical diffusion was the dominant process responsible for the transport of magnesium across this particular contact at Vinal Cove. A second Vinal Cove profile has a very similar gradient in magnesium concentration but with significantly less magnesium isotopic fractionation than expected. This suggests that mass transport at this location was only partly by diffusion and that some other mass transport mechanism such as mechanical mixing must have also played a role. The magnesium isotopic composition of samples from Aztec Wash shows no resolvable isotopic fractionation across the contact between the mafic and felsic rocks. The different degrees of magnesium isotopic fractionation associated with otherwise similar composition gradients in natural settings show that kinetic isotope fractionations provide a key discriminator for establishing whether or not molecular diffusion was the process responsible for an observed elemental gradient. In the one case of a contact at Vinal Cove where we are confident that the magnesium elemental and isotopic gradients were produced by diffusion, we deduced a cooling rate of about 1.5°C per day.