An analogue model of melt segregation and accumulation processes in the Earth’s crust

Abstract

An analogue experiment was carried out to model melt segregation from the solid rock matrix and its subsequent transport. Carbon dioxide gas and sand were used as analogue materials of crustal partial melt and host rock, respectively. The analogue model displays the diffusional transport mode at low flux rates and the transition to the ballistical mode as the response of the system to a higher gas flux. The ballistical mode is characterized by discontinuous transport and extraction of the gas phase in separate batches, which leads to the development of power law batch size distribution in the system. The gas is extracted preferentially in large batches and does not influence the state of the system and size distribution of remaining batches. The implications of the analogue model to real magmatic processes are supported by power law leucosome width distributions measured in several migmatite localities. The emergence of fractality and 1/f power spectrum of system fluctuations provide evidence of possible self-organized critical nature of melt segregation processes.

Keywords

• analogue modelling
• melt segregation
• migmatites
• fractals
• self-organized criticality