Effects of shock metamorphism on clay mineralogy: Implications for remote sensing of martian clays

One of the most important discoveries in recent exploration of Mars has been the detection of clay minerals within materials exhumed by meteor impact, which point to ancient subsurface alteration and possible habitable conditions at depth. These "crustal clays" occur within central peaks, ejecta, and uplifted rims of many large craters (Ehlmann et al., Nature 2011). The geologic context of phyllosilicates in these settings suggests that most of these deposits represent clays that formed in the subsurface and were later exhumed by impact, rather than clays that formed as a consequence of impact. Therefore, crustal clays exposed at the surface are likely to have experienced some effects of shock metamorphism and/or thermal alteration related to meteor impact. We are investigating the effects of shock metamorphism on the mineralogy of phyllosilicates in the laboratory. Purified, size-separated clay mineral samples were pressed into pellets to decrease internal porosity and were subsequently shocked using the Flat Plate Accelerator at NASA Johnson Space Center. Five minerals (nontronite, saponite, serpentine, chlorite, and kaolinite) were shocked to six pressure steps (10, 20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 GPa). The recovered, shocked samples are being analyzed by thermal infrared emission, visible/near-infrared reflectance, X-ray diffraction (XRD), Mossbauer spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Results thus far suggest that shock metamorphism has little effect on the structure or infrared signature of the clay minerals at pressures <20 GPa. One exception is the decrease in 3-D ordering in chlorite at 10 GPa, which steadily decreases until it is essentially lost at 30 GPa. At shock pressures of 20 GPa and higher, all minerals show evidence for broadening of the basal 001 reflection, indicative of progressive decrease in crystallite size. Above 30 GPa, the structures are intensely altered and by 40 GPa, most structural order is lost, based on both XRD and TEM data. Near-infrared and thermal emission spectroscopy results are consistent with these observations. The spectral structure in thermal emission data attributable to Si-O stretching, Si-O bending, and Si-O-(Fe,Mg) deformations is greatly decreased at 20 GPa and nearly lost by 40 GPa. Spectral contrast of the (Fe,Mg)-OH absorption located near 2.29 μm in near-infrared reflectance data of ferruginous clay is greatly decreased upon initial shock. At 40 GPa, this feature has lost all internal spectral structure, though a broad absorption in the same region is retained. Lastly, Mossbauer spectroscopy indicates that clays containing ferrous iron are progressively oxidized as a function of shock pressure. In the case of a meteor impact, intense shock pressures are highly localized phenomena although low shock pressures might affect a large fraction of target materials (French, 1998). Our results suggest that relatively low shock pressures (<20GPa) should not strongly alter the interpretation of clay mineralogy from the infrared perspective. Therefore first-order interpretations of the mineralogy of crustal clays exhumed by meteor impact on Mars from infrared data are likely valid. However, we expect to identify localized regions of clay minerals shocked to higher pressures on the martian surface in future work using these data.