Pattern formation in geochemical systems.
Compositional patterns are extremely common in natural minerals. While, in many cases, variations in the solid mineral composition reflect the external changes in the environment at the time of the mineral formation, the role of self-organization is increasingly acknowledged. For example, in reactio...
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University of Ottawa (Canada)
2009
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6237 http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-11158 |
| Summary: | Compositional patterns are extremely common in natural minerals. While, in many cases, variations in the solid mineral composition reflect the external changes in the environment at the time of the mineral formation, the role of self-organization is increasingly acknowledged. For example, in reaction-transport systems, the patterns may form spontaneously from an unpatterned state at the time of crystal growth and then become preserved by being "frozen" in the solid mineral. In this work, the pattern formation by self-organization is investigated by means of model construction and computer simulations in several minerals from different geologic environments. The impact of environmental noise is investigated on a model of oscillatory zoning in plagioclase feldspar. It is shown that environmental noise can lead to pattern formation such as oscillatory zoning, even when no deterministic periodic solutions exist. Coherence resonance close to the Hopf bifurcation is observed. Oscillatory zoning in barite-celestite system is simulated to quantitatively describe the results of the previously reported nucleation and growth experiments. The zoning is thought to be formed by autocatalytic growth from an aqueous solution. In addition to the description of the reaction-diffusion system in terns of partial and ordinary differential equations, a cellular automata model is proposed for the first time for this oscillatory crystallization type of problems. A quantitative model of banding in Mississippi Valley-type sphalerite is presented. Banded ring-like patterns are shown to arise due to a self-propagating sequence of growth and dissolution (coarsening wave). A two-dimensional model is presented for the first time and the conditions for the pattern generation and preservation are discussed. A number of time series analysis techniques are applied to characterize the compositional patterns observed in natural minerals as well as in the colored rythmites found in the marine clay sediments of the Ottawa Valley. Several caveats in interpreting the results of such analyses are outlined. |
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