An assessment of the record in compositional variations from mantle source to magmatism at East Island, Crozet archipelago

The Crozet archipelago, located midway between Madagascar and Antarctica, constitutes the emerged part of the easternmost bank of the Crozet plateau, which lies upon upper Cretaceous oceanic seafloor derived from the Southeast Indian Ridge. It forms an elongated chain of five islands and islets, divided into two groups: an older eastern island group (< 9 Ma) composed by large-scale volcanic landmasses (i.e. East and Possession islands) and a younger western one (< 5.5 Ma) with pint-sized islands. The whole region exhibits some of the most typical gravimetric, seismic and bathymetric characteristics associated with upwelling hotter than average mantle including: a geoid high, a topographic swell, a deep low-velocity zone (up to 2350 km), an anomalous heat flow and a thickened crust (10–16.5 km). Most of these features are exacerbated by the near stationary absolute motion of the Antarctic plate. However, since thirty years, the chemical composition of Crozet archipelago magmas has beneficiated from little interest compared to that of other Earth’s hotspots. Because of the occurrence of both a thick and old lithosphere and of a near stagnant absolute plate motion, new data from the Crozet archipelago magmatic record will provide new critical perspective on oceanic island building processes. The data presented here are based on a basaltic suite of ~ 25 samples collected by a “Terres Australes et Antarctiques Francaises” expedition in 1969 from the northern part of East Island. Our alkali basalts from the Crozet archipelago are distinct from other oceanic within-plate magmatic rocks in showing ubiquitous large depletions in LILE with respect to other incompatible elements, although these rocks constitute one of the most incompatible-element-enriched suites among Earth’s oceanic island basalts (OIB). The similarity of their trace element ratios and parallelism of their rare earth element patterns indicate: (1) a mantle source homogeneity over at least 1 Ma; (2) an uniformity of the melting conditions (i.e. degree of melting and residual mineralogy) during most of the sub-aerial eruptive history involving very small melting degrees of a garnet-phlogopite bearing, enriched mantle source, as to be expected to occur beneath an old tectonic plate where the bottom of the lithosphere is likely near the garnet to spinel transition. We will present new geodynamical and geochemical constraints on the mechanisms of formation for such garnet-phlogopite-bearing sources in oceanic island environments.