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Geochemical variability in distal and proximal glass from the Youngest Toba Tuff eruption

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Abstract

The Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT, erupted at ca. 74 ka) is a distinctive and widespread tephra marker across South and Southeast Asia. The climatic, human and environmental consequences of the YTT eruption are widely debated. Although a considerable body of geochemical data is available for this unit, there has not been a systematic study of the variability of the ash geochemistry. Intrinsic (magmatic) and extrinsic (post-depositional) chemical variations bring fundamental information regarding the petrogenesis of the magma, the distribution of the tephra and the interaction between the ash and the receiving environment. Considering the importance of the geochemistry of the YTT for stratigraphic correlations and eruptive models, it is central to the YTT debate to quantify and interpret such variations. Here, we collate all published geochemical data on the YTT glass, including analyses from 67 sites described in the literature and three new samples. Two principal sources of chemical variation are investigated: (i) compositional zonation of the magma reservoir and (ii) post-depositional alteration. Post-depositional leaching is responsible for up to ca. 11 % differences in Na2O/K2O and ca. 1 % differences in SiO2/Al2O3 ratios in YTT glass from marine sites. Continental tephras are 2 % higher in Na2O/K2O and 3 % higher in SiO2/Al2O3 with respect to the marine tephra. We interpret such post-depositional glass alteration as related to seawater-induced alkali migration in marine environments. Crystal fractionation and consequential magmatic differentiation, which produced order-of-magnitude variations in trace element concentrations reported in the literature, also produced major element differences in the YTT glass. FeO/Al2O3 ratios vary by about 50 %, which is analytically significant. These variations represent magmatic fractionation involving Fe-bearing phases. We also compared major element concentrations in YTT and Oldest Toba Tuff (OTT) ash samples, to identify potential compositional differences that could constrain the stratigraphic identity of the Morgaon ash (western India); no differences between the OTT and YTT samples were observed.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Dudley Stamp Memorial Award (Royal Geographical Society), the Cambridge-India Partnership, the SMUTS Memorial Fund, Philip Lake Fund, Sidney Sussex College and the William George Fearnsides Fund (Geological Society of London). We thank Rachna Raj, Alpa Shridar, L.S. Chamyal, N. Karmalkar and V. Kale for support provided during fieldwork. E.G. particularly thanks Steve Boreham, Chris Rolfe, Chiara Petrone and Jason Day for facilitating her work in the Geography Science Laboratories, Department of Geography and in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. We also thank Sacha Jones for providing ash samples from Jwalapuram and Hermann Kudrass for providing information about the Bay of Bengal cores. We thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript for their valuable comments.

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  1. E. Gatti

    Present address: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Dr., Pasadena, CA, 91109, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, CB2 3EN, Cambridge, UK

    E. Gatti, P. L. Gibbard & C. Oppenheimer

  2. Institut für Geologie, Universität Bern, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    I. M. Villa

  3. Università di Milano Bicocca, Milan, 20126, Italy

    I. M. Villa

  4. Department of Geology, Anna University, Chennai, 600 025, India

    H. Achyuthan

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Appendix

Appendix

Before focusing on natural intrinsic or extrinsic variations of the YTT glass, we had to dismiss the possibility of analytical errors arising from inter-laboratory biases. Artefacts resulting from analytical conditions (i.e. differences in the calibration standards, measurement techniques, instrumentation, etc.) can produce detectable variations in the major compounds, in particular alkalis, Si and Al. We thus evaluated data for the geochemical composition of YTT for 17 samples from the same localities. In order to quantify inter-laboratory reproducibility, we plotted the variability of SiO2 and Al2O3 contents for identical samples reported in the literature (Table 3 and Fig. 6).

Table 3 The selected 17 samples have been analysed by at least two different laboratories. Sixteen samples are from literature, while one (JWP3-11s) is from this study. This sample has been added to compare the potential variation between same samples analysed in the same laboratory but at distance of time
Full size table
Fig. 6
figure 6

Inter-laboratory reproducibility. Same symbols indicate same sites and same colours indicate same authors. The graph shows four pairs and one triplet of samples analyzed in several laboratories. The analyses are internally consistent within the reported uncertainty of 1 %

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The SiO2 and Al2O3 contents for the sample collected at the Jwalapuram site 3 (JWP) reported by Petraglia et al. (2007) and re-analysed here are ca. 1 % lower than those of the sample analysed by Smith et al. (2011). Indian and Malaysian samples (filled circles in Fig. 3) published by Westgate et al. (1998) have lower Al2O3 (by ca. 2 %) compared with the same samples analysed by Shane et al. (1995). The SiO2/Al2O3 ratios reported for the same samples thus vary by 1–3 %.

Analyses of the same glass samples performed in several laboratories show small offsets, within the stated analytical uncertainties, that are likely to arise from variations in techniques applied, instrumentation and standards used. For example, our analysis of the sample from JWP site 3 (India) is indistinguishable from that reported by Petraglia et al. (2007), which was collected from the same stratigraphic section and analysed in the same laboratory. Between these two samples and that analysed by Smith et al. (2011) in a different laboratory, the relative differences are ≤5 % in the Al2O3 and SiO2 concentrations. The results suggest that geochemical analyses of the major elements in the YTT in this database are affected by relative inter-laboratory differences of the order of few percent at most. These small variations do not mask the broad characterisation of the YTT. However, they do suggest that any study attempting to reveal very subtle geochemical variability should be based on analyses from a single laboratory, performed in a short period under stable instrumental conditions (Kuehn et al. 2011).

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Gatti, E., Villa, I.M., Achyuthan, H. et al. Geochemical variability in distal and proximal glass from the Youngest Toba Tuff eruption. Bull Volcanol 76, 859 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00445-014-0859-x

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