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Mantle segmentation along the Oman ophiolite fossil mid-ocean ridge

Nature volume 432, pages 167–172 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

It has been difficult to relate the segmentation of mid-ocean ridges to processes occurring in the Earth's underlying mantle, as the mantle is rarely sampled directly and chemical variations observed in lavas at the surface are heavily influenced by details of their production as melt extracted from the mantle. Our understanding of such mantle processes has therefore relied on the analysis of pieces of fossil oceanic lithosphere now exposed at the Earth's surface, known as ophiolites. Here we present the phase chemistry and whole-rock major- and trace-element contents of 174 samples of the mantle collected along over 400 km of the Oman Sultanate ophiolite. We show that, when analysed along the fossil ridge, variations of elemental ratios sensitive to the melting process define a three-dimensional geometry of mantle upwellings, which can be related to the segmentation observed in modern mid-ocean ridge environments.

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Figure 1: Sampling location and projection method.
Figure 2: Mineral and whole-rock chemical variation range.
Figure 3: Depth and across-strike mantle homogeneity tests.
Figure 4: Along-ridge variations of the raw chemistry of the studied peridotites.
Figure 5: Along-ridge variations of the peridotite chemistry after processing and the resulting synthetic model for the Oman mantle segmentation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank G. Ceuleneer for his help during this study. We are indebted to H. Al Azri and to J.-P. Breton for their support. We are grateful to M. Polvé who let us work in her geochemistry laboratory in Toulouse. We also thank B. Reynier, M. Valladon and J. Cotten for their help during ICP-MS and ICP-AES analyses, and M. Bohn who is in charge of the electron microprobe. We also thank E. Boeuf and H. Loyen for help with the samples and thin-section preparations. Financial support was provided by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (INSU-SDU) through the IT programme and by the MEN (to L.L.M.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UMR-CNRS 6112, Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique, Université de Nantes, 2 rue de la Houssinière, BP 92208, 44322, cedex 3, Nantes, France

    Laurent Le Mée, Jacques Girardeau & Christophe Monnier

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  1. Laurent Le Mée
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Correspondence to Laurent Le Mée.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Table 1

This table shows the chemical data used to define the Oman mantle segmentation: spinel major-element contents, whole-rock major and trace-element contents. (XLS 114 kb)

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Mée, L., Girardeau, J. & Monnier, C. Mantle segmentation along the Oman ophiolite fossil mid-ocean ridge. Nature 432, 167–172 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03075

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