A Mantle Xenolith Window Into the Grenville Orogeny of Southern Laurentia

The creation and isolation of the craton, or stable SCLM, is intimately connected to orogenesis. However, the nature of the lithospheric mantle beneath orogenic belts is incompletely understood due to the general lack of mantle xenolith-bearing basaltic magmas in such regions. One such place where we are afforded the opportunity to study the deep lithosphere beneath an orogenic belt is in central Texas, United States. Mantle xenoliths occur in late Cretaceous alkali basaltic magmas erupted through the remnants of the Appalachian - Ouachita structural belt of eastern and southern Laurentia. The Appalachian - Ouachita structural belt, which is buried beneath most of the Gulf Plain, represents two dissimilar cycles of orogenesis. The earlier cycle was the culmination of a long period of Proterozoic juvenile crust formation along Laurentia's southern and eastern margin. The more recent (Paleozoic) cycle created the fold and thrust belts currently exposed in the Appalachian and Ouachita Mountains, but involved mainly thin-skin tectonics and accretion of terranes, rather than continental suprasubduction settings. We are interested in identifying the process which emplaced mantle lithosphere beneath this ancient orogenic belt, and whether the original lithospheric mantle has been preserved there. Here, we show that the xenoliths beneath west-central Texas are of continental origin. These samples also have geochemical signatures suggestive of a suprasubduction zone setting in the form of enrichments in fluid-mobile trace (e.g. La) elements over fluid-immobile trace elements (e.g. Nb). These observations imply that the original continental lithosphere created in the Proterozoic suprasubduction zone setting was likely preserved during continent-continent collision and did not undergo wholesale delamination over a billion year period. During this period, the mantle convectively resisted two episodes of supercontinent rifting. However, the lithospheric mantle may have been subsequently partially thinned or modified by extension associated with opening of the Gulf of Mexico or post-orogenic relaxation.