Temperatures and Melt Water Contents at the Onset of Phenocryst Growth in Quaternary Nepheline-Normative Basalts Erupted along the Tepic-Zacoalco Rift in Western Mexico

Nepheline-normative, high-Mg basalts erupted from the western Mexican arc, along the Tepic-Zacoalco rift (TZR), have a trace-element signature consistent with an asthenosphere source, whereas calc-alkaline basalts erupted from the central Mexican arc in the Michoacan-Guanajuato volcanic field (MGVF) have a trace-element signature consistent with a mantle source strongly affected by subduction fluids. In this study, olivine-melt thermometry and plagioclase-liquid hygrometry are used to constrain the temperature and melt water content of the alkaline TZR basalts. The presence of diffusion-limited growth textures in olivine and plagioclase phenocrysts provide preliminary evidence of rapid growth during ascent. For each basalt sample, a histogram of all analyzed olivines in each sample allows the most Fo-rich composition to be identified, which matches the calculated composition at the liquidus via MELTS (Ghiorso & Sack, 1995; Asimow & Ghiorso, 1998) at fO2 values of QFM +2. Therefore a newly developed olivine-melt thermometer, based on DNiol/liq (Pu et al., 2017) was used to calculate temperature at the onset of olivine crystallization during ascent. Temperatures range from 1076-1247°C, whereas those calculated using an olivine-melt thermometer based on DMgol/liq range from 1141-1236 °C. Olivine-melt thermometers based on DMgol/liq are sensitive to melt H2O content, therefore ΔT = TMg - TNi (≤ 82 degrees) may be used as a qualitative indicator of melt H2O (≤ 2.6 wt% H2O; Pu et al., 2017). When temperatures from the Ni-thermometer are applied to the most calcic plagioclase in each sample (Waters & Lange, 2015), calculated melt H2O contents range from 1.3-1.9 (± 0.4) wt%. These values are significantly lower than those obtained from high-Mg calc-alkaline basalts from the MGVF using similar methods (1.9-5.0 wt%; Pu et al., 2017), consistent with a reduced involvement of slab-derived fluids in the origin of the alkaline TZR basalts from western Mexico.