The 425 Ma Arrochar and Garabal Hill-Glen Fyne complexes of highland Scotland are examples of post-orogenic magmatism accompanying extensional collapse of an orogen, in this case the Caledonian. The rocks are dominantly high-K series, but range from medium-K to shoshonitic. Mantle upwelling, melting and the intrusion of large volumes of mafic magma into the crust are inferred to have accompanied lithospheric thinning, and to have provided the heat source for melting of young arc crust accreted during the preceding subduction epoch.Fluids evolved from the subducting slab are inferred to have caused high degrees of enrichment in the overlying mantle wedge. Deep in the crust, the mantle-derived, K-rich mafic to intermediate magmas mixed with felsic crustal melts to form the spectrum of magmas intruded in the two complexes. Microgranular enclaves in the granitic rocks represent mafic magmas derived from the enriched mantle and hybridised by reaction, diffusion and mechanical mixing with their host felsic magmas, but they do not form part of the evolutionary series that produced the host magmas. Rather than inheriting its LILEenriched character directly from crustal melts, or from crustal assimilation by mafic magmas, the high-K series may commonly owe at least part of its potassic character to the involvement of mantle (highly metasomatised by slab-derived fluids) as a major magma source. Enclave suites, though prominent in some granitic rocks should not be assumed to represent magmas that played a significant role in the production of the chemical variations in their host magmas.

ABSTRACT:Most natural systems display non-linear dynamic behaviour. This should be true for magma mingling and mixing processes, which may be chaotic. The equations that most nearly represent how a chaotic natural system behaves are insoluble, so modelling involves linearisation. The difference between the solution of the linearised and ‘true’ equation is assumed to be small because the discarded terms are assumed to be unimportant. This may be very misleading because the importance of such terms is both unknown and unknowable. Linearised equations are generally poor descriptors of nature and are incapable of either predicting or retrodicting the evolution of most natural systems. Viewed in two dimensions, the mixing of two or more visually contrasting fluids produces patterns by folding and stretching. This increases the interfacial area and reduces striation thickness. This provides visual analogues of the deterministic chaos within a dynamic magma system, in which an enclave magma is mingling and mixing with a host magma. Here, two initially adjacent enclave blobs may be driven arbitrarily and exponentially far apart, while undergoing independent (and possibly dissimilar) changes in their composition. Examples are given of the wildly different morphologies, chemical characteristics and Nd isotope systematics of microgranitoid enclaves within individual felsic magmas, and it is concluded that these contrasts represent different stages in the temporal evolution of a complex magma system driven by nonlinear dynamics. If this is true, there are major implications for the interpretation of the parts played by enclaves in the genesis and evolution of granitoid magmas.

No abstract