Experimental determination of Pb partitioning between sulfide melt and basalt melt as a function of P, T and X

Abstract

We have measured the partition coefficient of Pb (KdPb) between FeS melt and basalt melt at temperatures of 1250–1523 °C, pressures of 1.0–3.5 GPa and oxygen fugacities at iron–wustite and wustite–magnetite. The total observed range of KdPb is 4.0–66.6, with a strong negative dependence on pressure and a strong negative dependence on FeO of the silicate melt (Fe+2 only). The FeO control was constrained over a wide range of FeO (4.2–39.5%). We found that the effect of oxygen fugacity can be subsumed under the FeO control parameter. Prior work has established the lack of a significant effect of temperature (Kiseeva and Wood, 2015; Li and Audétat, 2015). Our data are parameterized as: KdPb = 4.8 + (512 − 119*P in GPa)*(1/FeO − 0.021).

We also measured a single value of KdPb between clinopyroxene and basalt melt at 2.0 GPa of 0.020 ± 0.001. This experimental data supports the “natural” partitioning of Pb measured on sulfide globules in MORB (Patten et al., 2013), but not the low KdPb of ∼3 inferred from sulfides in abyssal peridotites by Warren and Shirey (2012). It also quantitatively affirms the modeling of Hart and Gaetani (2006) with respect to using sulfide to buffer the canonical Nd/Pb ratio for MORB and OIB (Hofmann, 2003). For the low FeO and pressure of segregation typical of MORB, KdPb ∼ 45, and the Nd/Pb ratio of erupted basalts will be the same as the Nd/Pb ratio of the mantle source. The remaining puzzle is why MORB and OIB have the same Nd/Pb when they clearly have different FeO and pressure of melt segregation.