Petrogenetic evolution of the Mesoproterozoic garnet-bearing granitoids of Dumka, Eastern India: Implication of garnet and biotite composition

Garnet is a petrologically significant accessory mineral of igneous rocks. Granite, tonalite, charnoenderbite and enderbite are prominent facies of 1450 Ma old Dumka Granitoids, Jharkhand district, India. Interestingly all the facies of Dumka granitoids contain good amount of garnet and biotite. Sphene, magnetite, ilmenite, zircon, monazite, allanite and rare hornblende present as accessory minerals. The garnets are mainly solid solutions between almandine, pyrope and grossular. Garnets contain 70.5-75.8 mol% of the almandine, 12.8-17.5 mol% of pyrope, 8-11 mol% of grossular and 0.6-2.9 mol% of spessartine. Composition of garnets fit well in the compositional range of igneous garnets suggested by Miller and Stoddard (1981). High MgO and CaO contents together with very low MnO of these garnets suggest that these have been crystallized from granitoid magma under high pressure in the lower crust. No compositional zoning is found in the analyzed garnets. Biotites of the granitoids are rich in Mg [Mg/(Fe+Mg) ratio > 0.4]. Biotites plot in Abdel-Rahman's (1994) field for biotites of calc-alkaline granites. The matrix biotites in these granitoids have higher Ti content than biotites coexist with garnets. Biotites coexisting with garnet are richer in Mg/Fe ratio than matrix biotites. Mg/Fe distribution coefficients between garnet core and matrix biotite (KD= (Mg/Fe)grt/(Mg/Fe)bt) for the Dumka enderbite and tonalite are 0.275 to 0.280 while for the granites the KD varies from 0.189 to 0.264. These KD values are higher than the values obtained from high-grade metamorphic rocks and are consistent with the values of igneous granitoids as shown by Lyons and Morse (1970). Absence of zoning in magmatic garnets in Dumka Granitoids indicate that these have crystallized above 700 °C, whereas absence of "spessartine bell-shaped profile" of the garnets of present study refute their metamorphic origin or that these crystallized below 700 °C (Dahlquist et al., 2007). Geothermobaric calculations reveal an initial crystallization temperature of 850°C and a pressure of 7.0-8.0 kbar, indicating that the parental magma was emplaced at lower crustal depths ( 25 km). Our studies reveal that garnets of Dumka Granitoids formed by direct crystallization from calc-alkaline magma in equilibrium with solid phases such as biotite.