Whole Rock and Mineral Chemistry from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP)

The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) was a large igneous province (LIP) emplaced approximately 200 million years ago during the rifting of Pangaea, shortly before the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. Although a comparatively small amount of the original province remains today, the locations of the existing outcrops on four continents (North America, South America, Africa, and Europe) show the extensive reach of igneous activity and indicate that the CAMP was likely one of the biggest LIPs known. Because of the geologic and global significance of this episode, a knowledge of the conditions that generated and emplaced such a large volume of magma would help better understand mantle and tectonic processes.

In this study, we compare whole rock and mineral chemistry data from three of the North American outcrops: the Palisades Sill of the Newark Basin in eastern New York and New Jersey, the Centreville Sheet of the Culpeper Basin in northern Virginia, and the York Haven pluton of the Gettysburg Basin in southeastern Pennsylvania. The diabases are quartz-normative theoleiites; their chemistries are indicate high degrees of internal differentiation and thermal disequilbirum, consistent with magma bodies cooling as a closed or near-closed system. The trace element data shows that, although there is evidence to support a deep mantle source for CAMP melts, there is also a shallower component influencing the chemistries of the samples. We interpret this as the signal of an ancient subducted slab through which CAMP melts passed.