Nature of the mantle roots beneath the North American craton: mantle xenolith evidence from Somerset Island kimberlites

The recently discovered Nikos kimberlite on Somerset Island, in the Canadian Arctic, hosts an unusually well preserved suite of mantle xenoliths dominated by garnet-peridotite (lherzolite, harzburgite, dunite) showing coarse and porphyroclastic textures, with minor gamet-pyroxenite. The whole rock and mineral data for 54 Nikos xenoliths indicate a highly refractory underlying mantle with high olivine forsterite contents (ave. Fo = 92.3) and moderate to high olivine abundances (ave. 80 wt.%). These characteristics are similar to those reported for peridotites from the Archean Kaapvaal and Siberian cratons (ave. olivine Fo = 92.5), but are clearly distinct from the trend defined by oceanic peridotites and mantle xenoliths in alkaline basalts and kimberlites from post-Archean continental terranes (ave. olivine Fo = 91.0). The Nikos xenoliths yield pressures and temperatures of last equilibration between 20 and 55 kb and 650 and 1300 degrees C, and a number of the peridotite nodules appear to have equilibrated in the diamond stability field. The pressure and temperature data define a conductive paleogeotherm corresponding to a surface heat flow of 44 mW/m(2). Paleogeotherms based on xenolith data from the central Slave province of the Canadian craton require a lower surface heat now (similar to 40 mW/m(2)) indicating a cooler geothermal regime than that beneath the Canadian Arctic. A large number of kimberlite-hosted peridotites from the Kaapvaal craton in South Africa and parts of the Siberian craton are characterized by high orthopyroxene contents (ave. Kaapvaal 32 wt.%, Siberia 20 wt.%). The calculated modal mineral assemblages for the Nikos peridotites show moderate to low contents of orthopyroxene (ave. 12 wt.%), indicating that the orthopyroxene-rich mineralogy characteristic of the Kaapvaal and Siberian cratons is not a feature of the cratonic upper mantle beneath Somerset Island. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.