Ultrahigh Pressure Metamorphism

This is the first volume in this series dealing with a petrological subject and contains the contributions of the lectures given at the 5th School of the European Mineralogical Union (EMU) on “Ultrahigh Pressure Metamorphism” held in Budapest from 21 to 25 July 2003. The topic of UHPM was selected because this extreme type of metamorphism, initially considered as a petrographic oddity by the geologic community, has now become recognised as a normal feature of continental plate collisional orogens and important to understanding just how deep the upper part of the continental lithosphere can subduct. We note that this School took place just twenty years from the first report by Christian Chopin of coesite in exposed orogenic metamorphic rocks of the continental crust. The lectures given at this school benefited by the scientific results of the research promoted by the ILP Task Groups III-6 and III-8, active on UHPM from 1994 to 1998 and 1999 to 2004, respectively, and published in a number of monographs and special issues of international journals. It is our strong belief that this petrologic topic should be recognised to be of paramount importance in the education of students and young researchers in Earth Science.
Mineral assemblages in ultrahigh pressure metamorphism: A review of experimentally determined phase diagrams
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Published:January 01, 2003
Abstract
In the last decade, the considerable amount of ultrahigh pressure terrains found around the world (Liou et al., 1998) and recent findings of mineral inclusions suggesting equilibration pressures up to more than 20 GPa (e.g. Stachel et al., 2000) have led to an increasing interest in petrological tools to be used to unravel the P-T evolution at extreme conditions. The expected resolution of such tools should provide a key for understanding tectonic processes responsible for the dynamics of UHP terrains.