Thermal maturation of incrementally assembled plutons

The Cretaceous zoned intrusive suites of the Sierra Nevada batholith (SNB) were each assembled over 8-11 million years through incremental amalgamation of sheeted intrusions. Emplacement as small sheet-like increments inhibits development of a voluminous zone of melt bearing rock; instead the active magma body represents only a small portion of the total volume intruded. Plutons formed incrementally will have a protracted thermal history (T-t) that can be elucidated using thermochronologic techniques yielding insights into the thermal evolution of the lithosphere at magma chamber-pluton scales. Thermal histories are derived for plutons from the dike-like John Muir Intrusive Suite (JMIS) and the laccolithic Mount Whitney Intrusive Suite (MWIS), both located in the eastern-central SNB, by correlating estimated zircon saturation and argon closure temperatures with U-Pb zircon and titanite, 40Ar/39Ar amphibole, biotite, and K-feldspar ages. Close agreement among zircon and hornblende ages indicate rapid cooling following intrusion. However, hornblende and biotite ages are separated by 6-9 million years indicating slow protracted cooling. We interpret these data to reflect the thermal maturation of an incrementally assembled magma system in which temperatures cycled between ~500-300°C for millions of years. Hornblende ages were not reset by younger intrusions, therefore maximum reheating temperatures did not exceed ~500°C for geologically significant durations. T-t cooling curves from the intrusive suites are used to calibrate finite difference numerical simulations of pluton assembly. Intrusion geometries are modeled (HEAT 3D, Wohletz, 2007) by stacking horizontal increments from the top-down and bottom-up and vertical increments are emplaced syntaxially and antitaxially and are designed to generate plutons of the approximate dimensions, depth of emplacement, and age range of the Sierran suites. Numerical simulations yield the following general observations: 1) an amorphous volume of melt bearing rock that is significantly smaller than the entire intrusive volume is formed independent of intrusion geometry; 2) melt percentages averaged over the assembled body are low, which is consistent with geophysical data that fail to locate large volumes of melt bearing rock beneath active volcanic regions; 3) temperatures cycle near the granitic solidus for protracted periods of time, which is consistent with the thermochronologic data from this study.