Publication Date:
2016-05-06
Description:
The influx of groundwater into hot kimberlite deposits results in the reaction of water with olivine-rich rocks. The products of the reaction are serpentine and release of latent heat. The rise of temperature due to the heat release increases the rate of the reaction. Under certain conditions, this self-speeding up of the reaction can result in instabilities associated with a significantly higher final serpentinization in slightly warmer regions of the kimberlite deposit. We conduct linear stability analysis of serpentinization in an isolated volume of porous kimberlitic rocks saturated with water and an inert gas. There is a counteracting interplay between the heat release tending to destabilize the uniform distribution of parameters and the heat conduction tending to stabilize it by smoothing out temperature perturbations. We determine the critical spatial scale separating the parameters where one phenomenon dominates over another. The perturbations of longer-than-critical length grow, whereas the perturbations of shorter-than-critical length fade. The analytical results of the linear stability analysis are supported by direct numerical simulations using a full nonlinear model.
Keywords:
Mineral Physics, Rheology, Heat Flow and Volcanology
Print ISSN:
0956-540X
Electronic ISSN:
1365-246X
Topics:
Geosciences
Published by
Oxford University Press
on behalf of
The Deutsche Geophysikalische Gesellschaft (DGG) and the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS).
