A record of igneous evolution in Elysium, a major martian volcanic province

www.nature.com/scientificreports OPEN received: 25 May 2016 accepted: 22 January 2017 Published : 24 February 2017 A record of igneous evolution in Elysium, a major martian volcanic province David Susko1, Suniti Karunatillake1, Gayantha Kodikara2, J. R. Skok3, James Wray4, Jennifer Heldmann5, Agnes Cousin6 & Taylor Judice1 A major knowledge gap exists on how eruptive compositions of a single martian volcanic province change over time. Here we seek to fill that gap by assessing the compositional evolution of Elysium, a major martian volcanic province. A unique geochemical signature overlaps with the southeastern flows of this volcano, which provides the context for this study of variability of martian magmatism. The southeastern lava fields of Elysium Planitia show distinct chemistry in the shallow subsurface (down to several decimeters) relative to the rest of the martian mid-to-low latitudes (average crust) and flows in northwest Elysium. By impact crater counting chronology we estimated the age of the southeastern province to be 0.85 ± 0.08 Ga younger than the northwestern fields. This study of the geochemical and temporal differences between the NW and SE Elysium lava fields is the first to demonstrate compositional variation within a single volcanic province on Mars. We interpret the geochemical and temporal differences between the SE and NW lava fields to be consistent with primary magmatic processes, such as mantle heterogeneity or change in depth of melt formation within the martian mantle due to crustal loading. The lava fields surrounding Elysium Mons and its neighboring super-shield volcanoes, Albor Tholus and Hecates Tholus (Fig. 1), record some of the most recent volcanism on Mars1–4. Most of the surface of Elysium Volcanic Province dates to the Amazonian period5–7 (beginning between 3.3 and 2.9 Ga), with a considerable areal extent of Late Amazonian age (beginning 0.6 to 0.3 Ga)4. Past work estimates that the age of the basement lava flows, the stratigraphically lowest and oldest we are able to observe in the region, date to ~4 Ga4. Other studies have identified late periods of volcanic activity in isolated areas of the southern portion of the Elysium Volcanic Province to extend to the last 250 Ma, including some remarkably young episodes as recent as 16.2–13.5 Ma, 4.3 Ma, and 3–2.5 Ma8. These dates highlight The Elysium Volcanic Province as particularly interesting, given its long and continuous history of volcanic activity. This long history suggests that these lavas could record varied magmatic evolution that can provide important constraints on the evolution of Mars as a geologically active and diverse planet. The Elysium Volcanic Province may also provide important insight for the geologic evolution of Amazonian terrains, given its geographic isolation in the northern lowlands away from other volcano-tectonic regions. Mid-latitude (exclude latitudes poleward of ~±45°) mapping of mass fraction distributions of the 9 elements: Al, Ca, Cl, Fe, H, K, Si, S, and Th, obtained from the γspectral data from the Mars Odyssey Gamma and Neutron Spectrometer (GRS) instrument suite2,9–13, showed a unique geochemical signature for Amazonian lava flows7 in the southeastern portion of the Elysium volcanic province (Fig. 1). Here, work by Karunatillake et al.2 identified depletions in both K and Th (two elements characterized by the strongest geochemical affinity during igneous processes)9,14 by more than the combined standard deviation and typical standard error relative to their respective global averages. The depletion in these elements indicate that the southeastern lava fields are chemically anomalous when compared to the compositions of the martian mid-latitudinal regolith to decimeter depth scales11. These anomalous geochemical signatures identify the Southeast Elysium lava fields as promising candidates for further geochemical investigation. 1 Department of Geology and Geophysics, Louisiana State University, Louisiana, USA. 2Department of Oceanography and Marine Geology, Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Sciences & Technology, University of Rahuna, Matara, Sri Lanka. 3SETI Institute, California, USA. 4School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. 5NASA Ames, California, USA. 6Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, Toulouse, France. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to D.S. (email: ) Scientific Reports | 7:43177 | DOI: 10.1038/srep43177 1 www.nature.com/scientificreports/ Figure 1. Location and geological setting of the Southeast (Green) and Northwest (Blue) Elysium lava fields with corresponding GRS pixels. Geology map adopted from the work by Tanaka et al.6 and made publically available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3292/pdf/sim3292_map.pdf. Inset image is a global reference map for Mars with overlain MOLA topography from Google Earth. The areal fraction of each unit within each region is quantified using ArcGIS software (pie charts). AHv is”Amazonian and Hesperian Volcanic unit”, lAv is “Late Amazonian Volcanic unit”, lAvf is “Late Amazonian Volcanic field unit”, lHvf is “Late Hesperian Volcanic Field unit”, Hve is “Hesperian volcanic Edifice unit”, Htu in the pie charts stands for “Hesperian Transition units” and is a combination of 3 geologic units: HNt (Hesperian-Noachian transition unit), lHt (Late Hesperian transition unit), and AHtu (Amazonian-Hesperian transition unit). Recently, Baratoux et al.3 used γdata from the Northwest Elysium lava fields (Fig. 1) to investigate the thermal history of Mars during the Amazonian period. These authors investigated the composition of the lavas, and compared them to the compositions of Hesperian and Amazonian volcanic provinces elsewhere on Mars3. Abundances of SiO2, FeO and ThO were used to estimate mantle potential temperature, degree of partial melting, and lithospheric thickness in correspondence with these volcanic provinces when these eruptions took place3. In this work, we compare the Southeast (SE) Elysium region to the Northwest (NW) Elysium region in order to constrain the spatial and temporal variation of composition of lava flows across a single martian volcanic province. Previous investigations in the Radar Stealth region2 suggests that data from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), can lead to inferences about the physical properties of surface-to-subsurface material. In this work we use HiRISE imagery to complement in our interpretation of geochemical signatures. Cerberus Fossae, an area overlapping the southern portion of the chemically anomalous region in SE Elysium, contains evidence of chemical layering involving volatile elements in the subsurface, potentially due to complex interactions among lava flows, volcanic aerosols and eolian sediment15. Morphologies, such as mesas and other related features in close proximity to Cerberus Fos (...truncated)