Horizontal transport of Picture Gorge Basalt magma through the Monument Dike Swarm determined by magnetic fabric
Flood basalts of the mid-Miocene Columbia River Basalt Group (CRBG) cover 210,000 km2 of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The source of CRBG melt is debated; widely spaced feeder dike swarms can be projected toward hypothetical sources near the Oregon-Idaho border. In this study, we use anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) to track magma flow in the Monument dike swarm (MDS), the feeder dikes of the Picture Gorge Basalt (PGB). This small formation of the main-phase CRBG eruptions allows us to explore in detail the localized dynamics of a large igneous province feeder system, with implications for the larger CRBG picture. We measured the magnetic fabric of 205 oriented paleomagnetic specimens subsampled from 97 samples collected from 15 dikes of the MDS. Thermal demagnetization and hysteresis loops show that the magnetic minerals are a mixture of single domain and multidomain sized titanomagnetites. At three dikes, the paleodepth of sampling was determined to be shallow (
Citation Information
| Publication Year | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Title | Horizontal transport of Picture Gorge Basalt magma through the Monument Dike Swarm determined by magnetic fabric |
| DOI | 10.1029/2024GC012078 |
| Authors | Margaret Susan Avery, Anthony Francis Pivarunas |
| Publication Type | Article |
| Publication Subtype | Journal Article |
| Series Title | Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems |
| Index ID | 70266755 |
| Record Source | USGS Publications Warehouse |
| USGS Organization | Geology, Minerals, Energy, and Geophysics Science Center |