Earth science: role of fO2 on fluid saturation in oceanic basalt

Abstract

Assessing the conditions under which magmas become fluid-saturated has important bearings on the geochemical modelling of magmas because volatile exsolution may profoundly alter the behaviour of certain trace elements that are strongly partitioned in the coexisting fluid. Saal et al. report primitive melt inclusions from dredged oceanic basalts of the Siqueiros transform fault, from which they derive volatile abundances of the depleted mantle, based on the demonstration that magmas are not fluid-saturated at their eruption depth and so preserve the mantle signature in terms of their volatile contents. However, in their analysis, Saal et al. consider only fluid-melt equilibria, and do not take into account the homogeneous equilibria between fluid species, which, as we show here, may lead to a significant underestimation of the pressure depth of fluid saturation.