Wetting of olivine by sulfide liquid: an example from the Central Asian Orogenic belt in NW China

Abstract

Experimental studies have demonstrated that olivine can be wetted by sulfide liquid under specific conditions. In this study, we investigate elongated sulfide-olivine patches in lherzolite from the Dahuangshan mafic-ultramafic complex (Central Asian Orogenic Belt, NW China), which display textural evidence indicative of this phenomenon. Two-dimensional (2D) microbeam X-ray fluorescence (micro-XRF) mapping and three-dimensional (3D) high-resolution X-ray computed tomography (HRXCT) scanning reveal that the sulfide-olivine patches are 1.0 ‒ 4.8 cm long, 0.3 ‒ 2.3 cm wide and 0.2 ‒ 2.0 cm thick, and have sharp boundaries in the lherzolite matrix. These patches consist entirely of olivine (Fo_7-81.9) embedded within interstitial sulfides. The sulfides dominantly comprise pyrrhotite (>94 vol%), minor pentlandite (< 6 vol%) and trace chalcopyrite, and contain a total of 1.1 ‒ 1.9 wt.% (Ni + Cu + Co). Low olivine-olivine-sulfide dihedral angles (averaging 44.9 ° ) indicate that olivine was wetted by the sulfide liquid in these patches. The crystal size distributions (CSDs) of the olivine grains in the sulfide-olivine patches are different from those of the olivine in the lherzolite matrix. These observations can be explained by the entrainment of pre-existing sulfide-olivine cumulates into flowing magma. The elongated shape and parallel distribution of the sulfide-olivine patches indicate that the magma flow was laminar. These findings support the hypothesis that sulfide liquid can wet olivine and under the right conditions can be transported and deposited as sulfide-olivine aggregates within magma conduits.

Keywords

Magmatic sulfide / Magmatic lineation / Sulfide-olivine patches / Three-dimensional morphology / Central Asian Orogenic Belt / Wetting

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jian Kang: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation. Xie-Yan Song: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Wei Xie: Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Resources, Data curation. Yu-Feng Deng: Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Resources, Data curation. Bo Wei: Writing - review & editing, Methodology, Investigation. Stephen J. Barnes: Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Wen Chen: Investigation. Wei-Dong Li: Data curation.

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.

Acknowledgements

We thank Wenqin Zheng and Xiang Li for assistance with EPMA analysis, Chao Wang for TIMA mapping and Jiangze Wang and Junhui Yang for help in HRXCT scanning. Local geologists of Sixth Geological Unit at Hami, Mr. Gang Deng, are grateful for their kind help in sample collection. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42330807 to X.-Y Song) and (42402088 to J Kang). We appreciate Associate Editor Kristoffer Szilas for handling our manuscript, as well as the constructive comments and suggestions provided by Dr. Dejan Milidragovic and two anonymous reviewers.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2025.102183.

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