Rotated staurolite porphyroblasts in the Littleton Schist at Bolton, Connecticut, USA

Abstract

ABSTRACTStaurolite porphyroblasts, 1.5–8cm in length and 0.3–2cm in width, in the Littleton Schist at Bolton, Connecticut, contain curved quartz inclusion trails which document synkinematic rotations of at least 135°. The orientations of long axes of these staurolite crystals define a weak preferred orientation in a plane approximately parallel to the external foliation. Serial sections of four differently orientated crystals and U‐stage measurements of the orientations of their inclusion trails demonstrate that the inflection hinge line and the statistical ‘symmetry axis’ characterizing the foliation within a porphyroblast are unrelated to the orientations of external crenulations and are, in all cases, parallel to the long axis of the porphyroblast. The cumulative rotation reflected in the curvature of the inclusion trails is a maximum in a c‐axis section through the initial core of a crystal. The amount of rotation about the c‐axis decreases linearly along the length of the crystal away from the nucleation site.The sense and amount of rotation recorded by a porphyroblast is related to its orientation. A tightly constrained transition from clockwise to anticlockwise rotation defines a slip direction that coincides with the preferred orientation of the staurolite c‐axes. The total rotation reflected by the inclusion trails increases as a function of the angle between the c‐axes of the staurolite crystals and the slip direction.Initially random staurolite porphyroblasts rotated during growth, as a consequence of laminar shear in the surrounding viscous matrix. This interpretation is quantitatively consistent with: the staurolite preferred orientation; its coincidence with the apparent slip direction; the correlation between both the sense and the amount of rotation and the orientation of the long axis of the porphyroblast; and the twisted conical shape of the family of surfaces defined by the inclusion trails.