The Partitioning of Sulfur Between Aqueous Fluids and Basaltic Melts

Download or read book The Partitioning of Sulfur Between Aqueous Fluids and Basaltic Melts written by Paola Reyes Luna and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Experimental studies on the partitioning of sulfur between hydrous fluids and silicate melts (Ds fl/m) have been performed to better understand sulfur degassing from mafic magmas and its influence on igneous petrogenesis, volcanic eruptions, and the formation of ore deposits. Although sulfur is abundant in mafic magmatic systems, the behavior of sulfur in basaltic magmas is still poorly understood due to experimental problems. A series of experiments were performed with a sample of a natural MORB (with ~800 ppm S) equilibrated with a H2O fluid phase to determine the partition coefficient of S between the fluid and melt. The experiments were conducted in a piston cylinder apparatus at 500 MPa, 1150 and 1050 ̊C, and at log fO2 NNO+1.8 (Nickel-nickel oxide buffer+1.8 log units) to simulate island arc oxygen fugacities. All experiments were done at sulfate and sulfide undersaturated conditions. Experiments were quenched isobarically and analyzed by electron microprobe. Although almost all successful experiments contained quench crystals, we were able to obtain reliable analyses of the quenched melt that were combined with the water concentration in melt modeled following Papale et al. (1999). These values were used to calculate the concentration of S in the fluid by mass balance. The results yield a Ds fl/m of ~3 +/-0.2 at 1150 ̊C and ~8 +/- 0.2 at 1050 ̊C. This Ds fl/m was independent of experimental duration and provides evidence of equilibrium in the experiments. Our results complement those of Lesne et al. (2011) and Zajacz et al. (2013) for basalts at 200 MPa. Although we have evidence that Ds fl/m decreases with increasing pressure, our results show that Ds fl/m strongly depends on the alkalinity of the mafic melt and it is more sensitive to oxygen fugacity changes rather than changes in temperature and pressure. At crustal pressures the Ds fl/m is high, ~80 (Lesne et al., 2011; Zajacz et al., 2013), at low fO2's between NNO-0.8 to NNO+1, whereas Ds fl/m decreases at oxygen fugacities above NNO+1 to values between 2 (this study at 500 MPa) and 6 at NNO+2.4 (at 200 MPa Lesne et al., 2011). We propose a model to predict the partitioning of sulfur between aqueous fluids and mafic melts based on our study and the results of Zajacz et al. (2013) and Lesne et al. (2011) using the parameters pressure, temperature, melt composition and oxygen fugacity. We obtained the coefficients through curve fitting, which allowed us to find the best fit for the experimental data. The model is calibrated to work for alkali rich and alkali poor basaltic melts at pressures from 100 to 500 MPa, temperatures from 1030 to 1150 ̊C, water saturated conditions or fluids with XH2O>0.5 and oxygen fugacities ranging from -0.8 to +2.4 [DELTA]NNO. Our model reproduces the measured sulfur partitioning of the dataset to within a relative error 20%." --