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Fluid Phase Separation Processes in Submarine Hydrothermal Systems

Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC 20015, U.S.A., dfoustoukos@ciw.edu

William E. Seyfried, Jr.

Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, U.S.A., wes@umn.edu

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
Mineral-fluid equilibria play a key role in governing the chemical evolution of modern submarine hydrothermal systems (Seyfried et al. 1999, 2004; Foustoukos and Seyfried 2005). Seawater circulating through high permeability zones of the upper oceanic crust, reaches areas close to the brittle-ductile boundary, where high temperature and pressure conditions enhance water/rock interactions, characterized by formation of hydrous alteration minerals and compositional changes in seawater chemistry, particularly enrichment of dissolved volatiles and transition metals (Fig. 1) (Kelley et al. 2002; German and Von Damm 2003). The buoyant hydrothermal fluids ultimately vent at the seafloor with exit temperatures reaching values higher than 350 °C. Mixing between ambient seawater and hydrothermal vent fluid induces metal sulfide precipitation, accounting for the common reference to the vent fluids as "black smokers." The large spatial compositional variability observed even between adjacent black smoker vent fluids, however, is mainly the result of phase separation and boiling processes intrinsic to the NaCl-H₂O system at elevated temperature and pressure conditions (Bischoff and Pitzer 1985; Bischoff and Rosenbauer 1987; Butterfield et al. 1994; Von Damm 1995, 2000; Berndt and Seyfried 1997; Lilley et al. 2003). Although this compositional variability is best indicated by the wide range of dissolved chloride concentrations of vent fluids that greatly deviate from seawater values (Von Damm et al. 1997; Von Damm 2000, 2004; Seyfried et al. 2003), confirming evidence of phase separation processes can also be traced to the distribution and abundance of dissolved volatiles and other aqueous species known to fractionate between vapor and liquid when seawater phase separation and segregation occurs (Oosting and Von Damm 1996; Berndt and Seyfried 1997; Fornari et al. 1998; Butterfield et al. . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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