The Songshugou dunite body, which occupies an area of about 20 km2, is the largest ultramafic massif in the eastern Qinling orogenic belt, Central China. The major compo-nent of this body is dunitic rocks including mylonitic dunite and coarse-grained dunite; they oc-cupy about 95 vol% of the total body. Petrography, mineral composition, major and trace ele-ments and primitive melt inclusions have been investigated in this paper; all revealed that this dunite body is the product of melt-rock interaction by porous percolation flow. In comparison with dunite sills or veins in harzburgite from the basal part of Oman ophiolite, this dunite body is characterized by lower contents of Al2O3, CaO and HREE but higher content of highly incom-patible elements and Zr and Hf. The LREE enriched patterns and primitive mantle normalized spidergrams of trace elements are also different from the Oman dunite. Combining with melt in-clusions observed in olivines, we conclude that this dunite body is the product of large- scale porous percolation flow of high-MgO melts within depleted mantle peridotites. The high-MgO magma, in essence, was most probably produced at the hot head of an upwelling mantle plume. The occurrence of the Songshugou dunite body is closely associated with the activity of mantle super-plume in Neo-Proterozoic era in the Yangtze Craton.
SU Li1,2, SONG Shuguang3 & ZHOU Dingwu1 1. Key Laboratory of Continental Dynamics of the Ministry of Education, Department of Geology, Northwestern University, Xi’an 710069, China
