The granite-upper mantle connection in terrestrial planetary bodies: an anomaly to the current granite paradigm?

Granite formed in the terrestrial planets very soon after their accretion. The oldest granite-forming minerals (4.4 Ga zircon) and granite (4.0 Ga granodiorite) indicate conditions resembling the present-day ones, with the presence of oceans and external processes related to liquid water. As a result, the current granite paradigm states that granite is not issued directly from the melting of the mantle. However, a granite-upper mantle connection is well established from several pieces of evidence. Tiny micrometre- to millimetre-sized enclaves of granite-like glassy and crystalline materials in Earth's mantle rocks are known in oceanic and continental areas. Earth's mantle-forming minerals, such as olivine, pyroxene, and chromite, can contain silicic materials, either as glass inclusions or as crystallised products (quartz or tridymite, sanidine, K-feldspar, and/or plagioclase close to albite end-member). Importantly, the same evidence is amply found in some types of meteorites, whether they are primitive, such as ordinary chondrites, or differentiated, such as IIE irons, howardite–eucrite–diogenite (HED), and Martian shergottite–nakhlite–chassignite (SNC) achondrites. Although constituting apparently an anomaly, the granite-upper mantle connection can be reconciled with the current granite paradigm by recognising that the conditions prevailing in the formation of granite are not only necessarily crustal but can occur also at depths in mantle rocks. Unresolved problems to be explored further include whether tiny amounts of granitic material within terrestrial mantles may be hints of greater abundances and more direct mantle involvement, and what role can be played by granite trapped within the upper mantle in lithosphere buoyancy.