Interactions between andesitic magma and poorly consolidated sediments: Examples in the neogene shirahama group, South Izu, Japan

The Upper Miocene-Lower Pliocene Shirahama Group of south Izu, Japan, is a sequence of volcanielastic shallow-sea sediments and subaqueous lava flows. It is gently warped with indistinct preferred orientation and is cross-cut by many andesitic intrusive bodies which range in size from less than a meter to several hundred meters. The intrusive bodies exhibit various shapes and weak preferred orientation, and often have hyaloclastic and peperitic textures along their peripheries. Hydrothermally altered and chaotically disturbed zones of host rocks also occur along the contacts. The areas where the intrusive bodies are abundant are almost coincident with the areas where the more inclined beds and synsedimentary faults are developed. The intrusive bodies dragged the surrounding beds with or without synsedimentary faults. Some intrusions occurred along the faults. Conjugate sets of the faults indicate that they were produced under unstable stress conditions. These relationships between the beds and the intrusive bodies are assumed to have originated mostly by interaction between hot magma and poorly consolidated wet sediments at a shallow depth beneath the sea floor. When the intrusions took place, the stress conditions in the beds were irregular and unstable, judging from the shapes and orientation of the intrusive bodies, and also from the deformation characteristics of the enclosing beds. Some of the intrusive bodies are probably feeder dikes which supplied lave to the Shirahama Group.