A petrologic perspective of K?lauea volcano's summit magma reservoir

Abstract

Two hundred years of magmatic history are documented by the lavas and tephra sampled from K?lauea's historical summit eruptions. This paper presents detailed petrographic and geochemical data for a comprehensive suite of samples erupted within or near K?lauea's summit caldera since the 17th century. Our results elucidate the range of magmatic processes that operate within the volcano's summit magma reservoir and document two compositional trends that span nearly the entire known range for the volcano. Prior to the 1924 summit crater collapse, a trend of increasing incompatible element and CaO and decreasing SiO2 abundances (at a constant MgO) prevailed. Thereafter, the trend reversed direction and has persisted for the rest of the 20th century, including during the current Pu'u 'Ō'ō eruption. The rapid and systematic nature of these temporal geochemical variations indicates that the summit reservoir is a single, relatively small body rather than a plexus of dikes and sills. Olivine fractionation is the dominant petrologic process within this reservoir. Petrographic observations and olivine and whole-rock geochemical data suggest that the summit reservoir has a crown of aphyric, more evolved, low-densiy magma. Differentiation within this crown involving clinopyroxene and plagioclase is more extensive than previously recognized in Kīlauea summit lavas. The effects of crystal fractionation are superimposed upon an evolving hybrid magma composition produced by mixing new, mantle-derived magmas with more fractionated reservoir magma. Frequent eruptions of these hybrid reservoir magmas document the rapid variation in parental magma composition. These compositional variations correlate with magma supply rate; both are thought to be influenced by the degree of melting of small-scale source heterogeneities within the Hawaiian plume. However, Kīlauea's source compositions and partial-melting processes have varied only within a narrow range over the past 350 kyr.