Phase Relations of Basalts in their Melting Ranges at PH2O = 5 kb. Part II. Melt Compositions

This paper describes the melting relations of three basalts,a Picture Gorge tholeiite, the 1921 Kilauea olivine tholeiite,and the 1801 Hualalai alkali basalt, at 5 kb water pressure,680–1045 °C, at the oxygen fugacities of the quartz-fayalite-magnetite(QFM) and hematite-magnetite (HM) buffer. All melts producedwithin the hornblende stability field are strongly quartzo-feldspathic.All are quartz-normative, including those from the alkali basalt,and all but two of the melts are corundum-normative. Melt compositionshows very little dependence on oxygen fugacity within the hornblendestability field, as MgO and FeO contents are very low. Whenhornblende begins to melt extensively (1000°–1045°C), the TiO₂, FeO, and MgO contents of the melt increaseabruptly. In this range, melts formed on the HM buffer havemuch higher Mg/Fe ratios and lower TiO₂ than melts formed onthe QFM buffer. Melt composition is also quite insensitive to changes in basaltcomposition, within the hornblende stability field. The chiefexception is the Na/Ca ratio, which varies directly with Na/Cain the starting basalt. When projected into the Ab-An-Or-Qzquaternary system, all melts produced follow a rather narrowspiral path through the tetrahedron; they descend from the Ancorner, moving toward Qz at constant Ab/Or, moving toward Oronly when plagioclase± quartz begin to precipitate. The melting behavior of hornblende, plagioclase, and augitein these experiments has been examined closely, with the followingresults: successive partial melts may differ from each otherby compositional increments which are very different in compositionfrom the minerals contributing to the melt in the temperatureinterval under consideration. These increments can almost neverbe expressed solely in terms of members of the one or two mineralsolid solutions from which they are actually derived. In a fewcases the increments cannot be expressed in terms of any reasonablecombination of minerals. This pattern contrasts markedly withthat observed in fractional crystallization, in which the differencebetween successive melts must always correspond to present orpossible phenocryst minerals. The contrast implies that magmaseries generated by any kind of melting process, equilibriumor fractional, should be recognizably different from seriesgenerated by fractional crystallization, if minerals like hornblendeor pyroxene are involved.