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Triple oxygen isotope constraints on the origin of ocean island basalts

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Abstract

Understanding the origin of ocean island basalts (OIB) has important bearings on Earth’s deep mantle. Although it is widely accepted that subducted oceanic crust, as a consequence of plate tectonics, contributes material to OIB’s formation, its exact fraction in OIB’s mantle source remains ambiguous largely due to uncertainties associated with existing geochemical proxies. Here we show, through theoretical calculation, that unlike many known proxies, triple oxygen isotope compositions (i.e. Δ17O) in olivine samples are not affected by crystallization and partial melting. This unique feature, therefore, allows olivine Δ17O values to identify subducted oceanic crusts in OIB’s mantle source. Furthermore, the fractions of subducted ocean sediments and hydrothermally altered oceanic crust in OIB’s mantle source can be quantified using their characteristic Δ17O values. Based on published Δ17O data, we estimated the fraction of subducted oceanic crust to be as high as 22.3% in certain OIB, but the affected region in the respective mantle plume is likely to be limited.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Zhengrong Wang for his helpful comments. H.B. and Y.L. are grateful for funding supports from the strategic priority research program (B) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB18010104) and (XDB18010100) and Chinese NSF Project (41490635). High-performance computational resources were partially provided by Louisiana State University (http://www.hpc.lsu.edu).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Xiaobin Cao, Huiming Bao & Yongbo Peng

  2. State Key Laboratory of Ore Deposit Geochemistry, Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guiyang, 550002, China

    Huiming Bao, Caihong Gao, Yun Liu & Yining Zhang

  3. CAS Key Laboratory of Crust-Mantle Materials and Environments, School of Earth and Space Sciences, USTC, Hefei, 230026, China

    Fang Huang

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  1. Xiaobin Cao
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Cao, X., Bao, H., Gao, C. et al. Triple oxygen isotope constraints on the origin of ocean island basalts. Acta Geochim 38, 327–334 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11631-019-00336-y

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