Dehydration melting and the relationship between granites and granulites

For more than half a century, thought about granite genesis and crustal evolution has been guided by the concept of partial melting in the lower crust. In this model, granitic magmas produced at depth are lost to shallow levels, leaving behind a more mafic, volatile poor residue that is depleted in incompatible components (H2O, alkalis, and heat-producing elements). Although granite extraction must be the dominant process by which crust is modified over time, the preferred model of granite genesis triggered by metamorphic dehydration reactions (dehydration melting) does not adequately explain important aspects of granite formation. The temperatures required for voluminous granite production by dehydration melting need heat and mass input to the crust from mantle-derived mafic magmas. In addition, prediction of the H2O contents of granitic liquids by extrapolation from low-pressure experiments to deep-crustal pressures (P) and temperatures (T) implies that the H2O resident in hydrous minerals is insufficient to account for large granite volumes, such as anorogenic granite batholiths in continental interiors. To test this, we conducted new experiments on the H2O contents of simple granitic liquids at 10kbar and 800-950°C. We confirm previous extrapolations from lower P and T indicating that a minimum of 3-4wt% H2O is present at the studied P and T in a granitic liquid in equilibrium with quartz and feldspars. For large-scale melting, this is much more than could have been supplied by the H2O resident in biotite and amphibole by dehydration melting at these conditions, unless lower-crustal temperatures were higher than generally inferred. Another problem with the dehydration-melting model is that the crystal chemistry of the large-ion lithophile elements (LILE) does not favor their partitioning into granitic liquids; rather, U, Th, Rb and the rare earth elements (REE) would more likely be concentrated in the postulated mafic residues. Finally, observations of migmatite complexes reveal many features that can not be satisfied by a simple dehydration-melting model.We suggest that the volatile components CO2 and Cl are important agents in deep-crustal metamorphism and anatexis. They induce crystallization and outgassing of basalt magmas at lower-crustal levels, where the combination of latent heat and liberated H2O may contribute to granite production, leading to larger melt fractions than for simple dehydration-melting models. Since the Cl and CO2 are very insoluble in granite liquids, granite generation leads naturally to production or separation of a coexisting metamorphic fluid with low H2O activity. Such a fluid could coexist with granulite-facies assemblages and yet be capable of dehydration, alkali exchange and LILE extraction to explain many chemical processes of deep-crustal metamorphism not readily explainable by dehydration melting