In earlier papers the author has reported that porphyry copper deposits in the southwest Pacific island arcs strongly favour a compressional stress environment, such as plate collision zones, while kuroko and related volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits favour extensional horizontal stress environment. In this paper he attempts to show how the physical and chemical effects of tectonic stress are implicated to metallogenesis.
The following series of hypotheses has already been put forward as a result of the recent accumulation of more accurate in-situ stress measurements in some deep mines, drill holes and other suitable locations, together with theoretical investigations based on these observations (Fig.1). Some of them are taken up here as;
(1) The orientation of one of the principal stresses can generally be assumed to be vertical or its close proxmity, and has the value of ρgH (load exerted by the overlying rock formation), as an approximate average (Fig.1, Table1).
(2) In the intensively compressional horizontal stress regime, both maximum and minimum horizontal stress, σHmax and σHmln, have a greater value than virtical stress, σ
v_??_ρgH and the stress gradient by depth is also greater than that of ρgH. In the extensional deviatoric horizontal stress regime, on the other hand, the value of the two principal horizontal stresses and their gradient by depth are smaller than ρgH (Fig. 1, Table 1).
(3) At shallow depth of the crust, i.e. 5 to 6 km, where actual in-situ stress measurements are only available, Heim's rule of the lithostatic pressure of ρgH for all three pricipal stress directions has not been observed. Instead, the difference of the values of three principal stresses increases with depth. Thus it is thought that the lithostatic state represent the non-deviatoric normal stresses and the departure from this state indicates the deviatoric stress available to drive geologic deformational processes such as folding and faulting.
Stress acting upon and arbitrary point in the crust (Fig. 2) can be expressed as a matrix formula
which can be resolved to non-deviatoric and deviatoric stress components as follows;
Non-deviatoric Deviatoric
Deviatoric stress will cause ductile deformation in an orogenic region to certain extent depending upon the amount of shear stress (σ
11-σ
33/2 in Fig. 3-A). In the case of a shallow intrusion of a small magma mass this deformation is well represented by several examples in Figure 5. The direction of the maximum horizontal stress is also noted. By the slow ductile deformation in geologic time such as illustrated above, stress will reach to certain equilibrium when P in the matrix above, which is the normal stress acting equally on 3 principal stress axes, reaches to the mean normal stress σ
11+σ
22σ
33/3. This P is assumed as a hydrostatical confining pressure acting on the intruded magma mass instead of pgH, Heim's lithostatic pressure (Table 2). A confining pressure closely regulates inner pressure of an intrusive body of hydrous magma. The author dare to assume, for practical purpose, that the confining pressure can be approximated to the value of magma pressure, at least in the case of the solidification of a hypabyssal intrusive stock of felsic magma (Fig. 4) in an orogenic region.
These two assumptions may often introduce nearly 1 Kbar of pressure difference onto the magma body at the same depth but under different deviatoric stress conditions. In the case of solidification of hydrous magma notable effects caused by the pressure can be anticipated especially in an area of second boiling. How this would control the metallogenesis particularly in the case of porphyry copper was investigated and described in the latter half of the paper.
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