Two Hundredth Post: More Continental Crust on South America's Andean Plateau

       This is our 200th blog post and our 48th month of publishing Partial Ellipsis of the Sun! Thanks for your support over the past four years!

      "Seismologists investigating how earth forms new continental crust have compiled more than 20 years of seismic data from a wide swath of South America's Andean Plateau and determined that processes there have produced far more continental rock than previously believed.


     "When crust from an oceanic tectonic plate plunges beneath a continental tectonic plate, as it does beneath the Andean Plateau, it brings water with it and partially melts the mantle, the layer below earth's crust," said Rice University's Dr. Jonathan Delph, co-author of the new study published this week. "The less dense melt rises, and one of two things happens: It either stalls in the crust to crystallize in formations called plutons or reaches the surface through volcanic eruptions."

     Dr. Delph said the findings suggest that mountain-forming regions like the Andean Plateau, which geologists refer to as "orogenic plateaus," could produce much larger volumes of continental rock in less time than previously believed.

     Co-author Dr. Kevin Ward, a researcher at the University of Utah, said, "When we compared the amount of trapped plutonic rock beneath the plateau with the amount of erupted volcanic rock at the surface, we found the ratio was almost 30:1. That means 30 times more melt gets stuck in the crust than is erupted, which is about six times higher than what's generally believed to be the average. That's a tremendous amount of new material that has been added to the crust over a relatively short time period."

     The Andean Plateau covers much of Bolivia and parts of Peru, Chile, and Argentina. Its average height is more than 12,000 feet, and though it is smaller than Asia's Tibetan Plateau, different geologic processes created the Andean Plateau. The mountain-building forces at work in the Andean plateau are believed to be similar to those that worked along the western coast of the U.S. some 50 million years ago. Dr. Delph said it's possible that similar forces were at work along the coastlines of continents throughout Earth's history.


     Most of the rocks that form Earth's crust initially came from partial melts of the mantle. If the melt erupts quickly, it forms basalt, which makes up the crust beneath the oceans on Earth; but there are still questions about how continental crust, which is more buoyant than oceanic crust, is formed. Drs. Delph and Ward spent several months combining public datasets from seismic experiments. Seismic energy travels through different types of rock at different speeds, and by combining datasets that covered a 500-mile-wide swath of the Andean Plateau, Ward and Delph were able to resolve large plutonic volumes that had previously been seen only in pieces.



     Over the past 11 million years, volcanoes have erupted thousands of cubic miles' worth of material over much of the Andean Plateau. Ward and Delph calculated their plutonic-to-volcanic ratio by comparing the volume of regions where seismic waves travel extremely slowly beneath volcanically active regions, indicating some melt is present, with the volume of rock deposited on the surface by volcanoes.

     "Orogenic oceanic-continental subduction zones have been common as long as modern plate tectonics have been active," Dr. Delph said. "Our findings suggest that processes similar to those we observe in the Andes, along with the formation of supercontinents, could have been a significant contributor to the episodic formation of buoyant continental crust."


Happy 200th!
Steph

Track Lighting: Dinosaur "Dance Floor" in Bolivia -- Over 5,500 Footprints

       These late Cretaceous dinosaur footprint fossils on a near-vertical outcrop in Bolivia represent at least 294 different dinosaurs (and, at least 8 species) with over 5,500 footprints.

       The paleontological site, known as Cal Orck'o, is located a few kilometers south of Bolivia's Sucre city center.

       Although, I imagine there was more chasing than dancing on this "Dinosaur Dance Floor," it is an exquisite find, uncovered in 1994, in a cement quarry. Both carnivores and herbivores are represented. This longest set of tracks is over 350 footprints! Parco Cretacio is now open to the public; 68 million years in the making!

     The tracks were likely created by a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, nicknamed Johnny Walker ;-).

     And these footprints were likely made by an Iguanodon.

      

      The extent of dinosaur footprints on over 25,000 square meters is being studied by Christian Myer and Martin Lockley (of Colorado Morrison Dinosaur Ridge footprint fame). The largest prints are 3 feet long.

     Tectonic uplift moved these fossil footprints to a 70 degree plus angle. Pretty wild dance party ;-).

Have you been to see the Bolivian dinosaur footprints? Have you seen dino tracks in the Connecticut River Valley or elsewhere?

Steph


{The Colorado Dinosaur Ridge footprints are quite spectacular, but are not nearly as extensive as the Bolivian tracks.}

Failure to Launch: Andes, Lava Coulée, and Chao Baby!

       Geologists from

Heidelberg University have discovered deposits of magma in the Andes sufficient to have set off a super-eruption but which, in fact, did not. 

     Researchers discovered that magma volumes of supervolcanic proportions have been continuously accumulating in the Altiplano-Puna region of the Andes since the last super-eruption nearly 2.9 million years ago. 

     These magmas, however, did not reach the surface to trigger a catastrophic eruption but instead slowly cooled at depth and hardened into plutonic rock, similar to the area we discussed in Russia two weeks ago. The results of the research were published in the journal Geology.

       
      Unlike the pluton they describe, the Chao volcano in northern Chile with a lava coulée (or flow) approximately 14.5 km long in the center of the image above flowed at the surface. The composition of the lava matches that of deposits of adjacent supervolcanic calderas. Chao erupted about 75,000 years ago, but zircon crystals in the lava were already forming in a subterranean magma reservoir for nearly three million years.

     "A supervolcanic eruption spews out more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of magma, which accumulated over time in reservoirs close the earth's surface," explains Dr. Axel Schmitt.

       "In turn, these reservoirs are fed from deeper layers in the earth's crust and the underlying mantle. During an eruption, the overlying rock layers collapse into the empty magma chamber and form depressions, known as calderas, of up to 100 kilometers in diameter." Schmitt indicates that there have been at least seven super-eruptions in the Altiplano-Puna region within the last ten million years, the most recent one about 2.9 million years ago. We don't understand why no further major eruptions have occurred since then and whether the region can now be considered inactive for such events.

      Using samples from five small lava domes in northern Chile and southeast Bolivia, the researchers investigated the most recent eruptions whose chemical composition matches the supervolcanic magmas from the region. They determined the age of very small zircon crystals from these lava flows with the aid of a high-spatial-resolution mass spectrometer. 

      "The mineral zircon forms almost exclusively in magmas, so its age reveals when those magmas were present under the volcano," explains Schmitt. "The astonishing result was that the ages of the zircons measured from all five of the smaller volcanoes extended continuously from the time of the eruption 75,000 years ago back to the last supervolcanic eruption."

     Dr. Schmitt reports that model calculations demonstrated that zircon formation is only possible over such long durations if the inflow of magma amounted to approximately one cubic kilometer over 1,000 years, which is unusually high for a relatively small volcano. The volcanologist explains that the lack of a major volcanic eruption does not necessarily indicate that magmatic activity has come to a complete halt. Perhaps the rise in magma from deeper regions merely slowed during the last 2.9 million years, forming a pluton.

      "However, our results also show that a relatively small increase in the long-term magma recharge from about one to five cubic kilometers in 1,000 years would recreate conditions favoring a catastrophic supervolcanic eruption. A new super-eruption in the Altiplano-Puna region would be possible, but only after a long lead time," said Dr.Schmitt.

Have you ever seen anything so (lava) coulée?
Steph