Transition between dislocation creep and diffusion creep in upper greenschist- to lower amphibolite-facies metacherts

To clarify the dominant deformation mechanism in continental middle crust at an arc-trench system, we used an SEM-EBSD system to measure the lattice-preferred orientations of quartz grains in fine-grained (~10 μm) metachert from the low-grade (chlorite and chlorite-biotite zones) part of the Ryoke metamorphic belt, SW Japan. The metacherts are composed mainly by quartz (> 94 vol.%), with small amounts of chlorite, muscovite and biotite. Quartz grain-sizes vary from 9 to 20 μm in diameter; grain sizes of quartz are weakly related to quartz modal abundances. Quartz c-axis fabrics do not exhibit distinct patterns that could be formed by dislocation creep. Fabric intensities are calculated: values of fabric intensity index proposed by Lisle (1985) and those of by Skemer et al. (2005), that is 'M-index', are 0.060-0.074 and 0.027-0.073, respectively. These values are very small, indicating that the quartz c-axis fabric patterns are comparable with a random distribution. In these samples, there are deformed radiolarian fossils and they are used as strain marker to analyze strain geometry and magnitude of the metacherts. According to the results of strain analysis using Rφ-f method, k-value and strain magnitude are 0.4-1.0 and 0.6-0.7, respectively. The strain magnitude is enough to form distinct fabric patterns, when dislocation creep is a dominant deformation mechanism. Therefore, in the metachert samples studied here, it suggests that dominant deformation mechanism is not dislocation creep, but diffusion creep. Although, when the grain size of quartz is ~10 mm, shear stress is ~several tens megapascal and upper greenschist- to lower amphibolite-facies condition (~500°C at 200-300 MPa), it has been considered that high-strained natural quartzose rocks, e.g., quartz-rich layers in banded ultramylonites, deformed by dislocation creep, the very-fine grained metacherts from the Ryoke metamorphic belt formed under the upper greenschist- to lower amphibolite-facies condition deformed by diffusion creep. The results presented here may suggest that the mechanism switch from dislocation creep to diffusion creep is due to not only grain-size of quartz, but also lower differential stress or strain rate. References: Lisle RJ (1985) Journal of Structural Geology, 7, 115-117. Skemer P, Katayama I, Jiang Z, Karato S (2005) Tectonophysics, 411, 157-167.