Lillooet Glacier basalts, southwestern British Columbia, Canada: products of Quaternary glaciovolcanism
The retreat of Lillooet Glacier (LG) has exposed a succession of pillow basalt and subordinate amounts of breccia and hyaloclastite. The lithofacies and physiographic setting suggest that the deposits have a glaciovolcanic origin and represent a partially dissected basaltic pillow-dominated tindar. Chemically, the LG volcanic rocks are basalt to basaltic andesite, and, as a group, they represent the highest-silica, Quaternary mafic products in the Garibaldi volcanic belt (GVB). Like other northern GVB (alkaline) basalts, they lack the Nb–Ta depletion signature typically associated with subduction-related products. Geochemical and petrologic analysis indicates that the LG basalts are comagmatic and that chemical variations within the suite are consistent with sorting of the observed phenocryst assemblage: olivine + plagioclase. Thermodynamic modeling establishes shallow, crustal, pre-eruptive storage conditions at <2 kbar (1 kbar = 100 MPa; or 7.5 km) and an H2O content of 0.5–1 wt.%. We estimate that the ...