Lithosphere tearing along STEP faults and synkinematic formation of lherzolite and wehrlite in the shallow subcontinental mantle Hidas, Károly Garrido, Carlos J. Booth Rea, Guillermo Marchesi, Claudio Bodinier, Jean-Louis Dautria, Jean-Marie Louni Hacini, Amina Azzouni Sekkal, Abla Subduction-transform edge propagator (STEP) faults are the locus of continual lithospheric tearing at slab edges, resulting in sharp changes in the lithospheric and crustal thickness and triggering lateral and/or near-vertical mantle flow. However, the mechanisms at the lithospheric mantle scale are still poorly understood. Here, we present the microstructural study of olivine-rich lherzolite, harzburgite and wehrlite mantle xenoliths from the Oran volcanic field (Tell Atlas, northwest Algeria). This alkali volcanic field occurs along a major STEP fault responsible for the Miocene westward slab retreat in the westernmost Mediterranean. Mantle xenoliths provide a unique opportunity to investigate the microstructures in the mantle section of a STEP fault system. The microstructures of mantle xenoliths show a variable grain size ranging from coarse granular to fine-grained equigranular textures uncorrelated with lithology. The major element composition of the mantle peridotites provides temperature estimates in a wide range (790–1165 ºC) but in general, the coarse-grained and fine-grained peridotites suggest deeper and shallower provenance depth, respectively. Olivine grain size in the fine-grained peridotites depends on the size and volume fraction of the pyroxene grains, which is consistent with pinning of olivine grain growth by pyroxenes as second-phase particles. In the coarse-grained peridotites, well-developed olivine crystal-preferred orientation (CPO) is characterized by orthorhombic and [100]-fiber symmetries, and orthopyroxene has a coherent CPO with that of olivine, suggesting their coeval deformation by dislocation creep at high temperature. In the fine-grained microstructures, along with the weakening of the fabric strength, olivine CPO symmetry exhibits a shift towards [010] fiber and the [010] and [001] axes of orthopyroxene are generally distributed subparallel to those of olivine. These data are consistent with deformation of olivine in the presence of low amounts of melts and the precipitation of orthopyroxenes from a melt phase. The bulk CPO of clinopyroxene mimics that of orthopyroxene via a topotaxial relationship of the two pyroxenes. This observation points to a melt-related origin of most clinopyroxenes in the Oran mantle xenoliths. 2020-05-14T11:28:40Z 2020-05-14T11:28:40Z 2019-07-10 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Hidas, K., Garrido, C., Booth-Rea, G., Marchesi, C., Bodinier, J. L., Dautria, J. M., ... & Azzouni-Sekkal, A. (2019). Lithosphere tearing along STEP faults and synkinematic formation of lherzolite and wehrlite in the shallow subcontinental mantle. http://hdl.handle.net/10481/62078 10.5194/se-10-1099-2019 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España European Geosciences Union