Origin of rhyolite by crustal melting and the nature of parental magmas in the Oligocene Conejos Formation,San Juan Mountains,Colorado, USA

Four closely spaced volcanoes (Summer Coon; Twin Mountains; Del Norte; Carnero Creek) form the east-central cluster of Conejos volcanic centers. These Conejos rocks range from high-K basaltic andesite to rhyolite, with andesite volumetrically the most abundant. Summer Coon and Twin Mountains are composite volcanoes. The Del Norte and Carnero Creek volcanoes are deeply eroded dacite shields. Rhyolite (10% of our Conejos analyses but a much smaller percentage by volume) is only known from Summer Coon and Twin Mountains volcanoes, although high-SiO₂ dacite occurs in the Del Norte volcano. The younger Hinsdale Formation contains a related series ranging from transitional basalt to high-K andesite; we use Hinsdale Formation analyses to represent Conejos parental magmas.Conejos and Hinsdale magmas evolved through AFC processes: Basalt, after interacting with lower crust, assimilated low K/Rb crust, similar in some ways to Taylor and McLennan (Taylor, S.R., and McLennan, S.M., 1985, The continental crust: its composition and evolution. Oxford, Blackwell Scientific.) model upper crust; main series basaltic andesite fractionated to high-K andesite; rhyolite was produced by melting of high K/Ba upper crustal rocks similar to granite gneiss known from inclusions and basement outcrops. Some rhyolite may have been back-mixed into fractionating andesite and dacite. Field evidence for assimilation includes sanidinite-facies, partially melted, gneiss blocks up to 1 m in diameter. Temperature estimates (1100–900 ° C) from two-pyroxene equilibria are consistent with this interpretation, as are the sparsely porphyritic nature of the most-evolved rhyolites and the absence of phenocrystic alkali feldspar.Our study supports the conclusions of previous workers on AFC processes in similar, but generally more mafic, Conejos magmas of the southeastern San Juan Mountains. Our results, however, emphasize the importance of crustal melting in the generation of Conejos rhyolite. We further speculate that Conejos magmatism, and the San Juan Volcanic Field (SJVF) in general, may represent an early phase of Rio Grande rift magmatism, the orogenic geochemical signature of the series having been generated through multi-level and extensive assimilation of varied Precambrian orogenic and anorogenic rocks.