Birner, Suzanne K., Cottrell, Elizabeth, Kelley, Katherine A., and Davis, Fred A. 2018. "Peridotites and basalts reveal broad congruence between two independent records of mantle f(O2) despite local redox heterogeneity." Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 494 172–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2018.04.035.
The oxygen fugacity (f(O2)) of the oceanic upper mantle has fundamental implications for the production of magmas and evolution of the Earth's interior and exterior. Mid-ocean ridge basalts and peridotites sample the oceanic upper mantle, and retain a record of oxygen fugacity. While f(O2) has been calculated for mid-ocean ridge basalts worldwide (>200 locations), ridge peridotites have been comparatively less well studied (33 samples from 11 locations), and never in the same geographic location as basalts. In order to determine whether peridotites and basalts from mid-ocean ridges record congruent information about the f(O2) of the Earth's interior, we analyzed 31 basalts and 41 peridotites from the Oblique Segment of the Southwest Indian Ridge. By measuring basalts and peridotites from the same ridge segment, we can compare samples with maximally similar petrogenetic histories. We project the composition and oxygen fugacity of each lithology back to source conditions, and evaluate the effects of factors such as subsolidus diffusion in peridotites and fractional crystallization in basalts. We find that, on average, basalts and peridotites from the Oblique Segment both reflect a source mantle very near the quartz-fayalite-magnetite (QFM) buffer. However, peridotites record a significantly wider range of values (nearly 3 orders of magnitude in f(O2) with a single dredge recording a range in f(O2) greater than that previously reported for mid-ocean ridge peridotites worldwide. This suggests that mantle f(O2) may be heterogeneous on relatively short length scales, and that this heterogeneity may be obscured within aggregated basalt melts. We further suggest that the global peridotite f(O2) dataset may not provide a representative sample of average basalt-source mantle. Our study motivates further investigation of the f(O2) recorded by ridge peridotites, as peridotites record information about the f(O2) of the Earth's interior that cannot be gleaned from analysis of basalts alone. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.
