Polycyclic aromatic compounds in crude oil as proxies for Permian Tarim large igneous province activities

Abstract

Large igneous provinces (LIPs), a critical area in Earth science, are closely related to paleoenvironmental evolution and biodiversity. The Permian Tarim large igneous province (TLIP) provides an ideal laboratory for correlational research. Previous reports show that the TLIP formed ∼300–262 Ma. Based on igneous lithology and the upper limit of single magmatic activity (<5 Ma), the TLIP can be divided into five main magmatic episodes. Core logging, seismic sections, lithofacies observations, and in-situ calcite U-Pb dating indicate diabase intrusions and a hydrothermal upwelling event (∼295.9–273 Ma) resulted from TLIP magmatic activity. The results indicate that polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) in oil are powerful proxies of magmatic intrusion and hydrothermal activity in the Permian TLIP. The existing diabase intrusion (EDI) samples show a higher concentration of high-molecular-weight (HMW) PACs (≥5-ring PACs) and greater combustion-derived PAC ratios. The distribution coupling between the diabase intrusion and PACs indicates that the HMW PACs are mainly derived from the cycloaddition reactions by the pyrogenic source (i.e., diabase intrusion). The conversion of phenanthrene (Phe), biphenyl (Bp), and dibenzothiophene (DBT) series compounds indicates that the oil is altered by hydrothermal activity. The hydrogenium and sulfur carried by the hydrothermal upwelling process promote the heteroatom incorporation of PACs. The cycloaddition and heteroatom incorporation reactions of PACs during the formation of LIPs offer a new perspective for evaluating their impact. PACs serve as effective proxies for LIPs and may also contribute to biological crises associated with LIPs.

Keywords

Large igneous province / Igneous intrusions / Hydrothermal / U-Pb dating / Polycyclic aromatic compounds

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Sudipto Bhattacharjee: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Software, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Sanjay Kumar Prajapati: Visualization, Resources, Methodology. Uma Shankar: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision. O.P. Mishra: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Resources, Project administration.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

Sudipto Bhattacharjee highly acknowledges IITM-Desk for fellowship support under the Ministry of Earth Sciences Research Fellowship Programme (MRFP). He extends his gratitude to Dr. R.S. Chatterjee (IIRS Dehradun), Mr. Tamal Samaddar (former MTech student, IIRS Dehradun), and Mr. Ravikant (Research Associate, National Center for Seismology, New Delhi) for sharing remote sensing knowledge and time-to-time advice. The authors thank the National Center for Seismology for providing waveform data and other necessary infrastructural support and computational facilities and supervision of the entire research for completion of this research work.

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