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SPINEL, KALSILITE, CLINOPYROXENE AND OLIVINE by

SPINEL, KALSILITE, CLINOPYROXENE AND OLIVINE by

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state of orthopyroxene has been successfully utilized to obtain cooling rates of meteorites<br />

and terrestrial rocks (c.f., Ghose 1965; Ganguly et al. 1994; Ganguly and Stimpfl 2000,<br />

Stimpfl 2003; and Stimpfl et al. 2005).<br />

Many Earth scientists have studied the ordering state in spinel from mantle<br />

xenoliths with an aim to obtain the cooling history of a rock. Princivalle et al. (1989)<br />

observed that a suite of rocks that had experienced the same cooling history exhibited<br />

approximately constant oxygen coordinates, u, which is related to cation distribution<br />

since u is an approximately linear function of the R(M-O)/R(T-O) ratio. Spinel can<br />

accommodate various cations in its two cation sites, tetrahedral (T) and octahedral (M)<br />

sites <strong>by</strong> combination of an intercrystalline elemental fractionation and an intracrystalline<br />

exchange reaction. The complex chemistry makes a natural spinel’s behavior more<br />

complicated and a less preferable candidate for a geospeedometer. Spinel has been used<br />

to obtain closure temperatures, which can only give us relative cooling between suites of<br />

rocks that have different thermal histories.<br />

In contrast to spinel and orthopyroxene, the ordering state in olivine as a function<br />

of T is not very useful in geological context because most of the natural samples exhibit<br />

close to a completely disordered configuration (KD = ~ 1.0). Moreover, high-temperature<br />

data are greatly controversial in the literature and a further investigation is needed to<br />

establish agreeable data and to eliminate the source of the discrepancy. In Figure 1, KD,<br />

M1 [XFe 2+ ] M2 [XMg]/ M2 [XFe 2+ ] M1 [XMg], is plotted as a function of temperature. Experimental<br />

results in the literature show three different trends. In all three, Fe 2+ initially prefers the<br />

M1 site but the results differ at higher temperature. (1) Artioli et al. (1995) reported KD<br />

16

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