Mixing dry and wet magmas in the lower crust of a continental arc: new petrological insights from the Bear Valley Intrusive Suite, southern Sierra Nevada, California

Exposures of arc crustal sections represent rare opportunities to directly evaluate lower crustal magmatic processes and their link to arc products in the middle and upper crust. Within the southernmost Sierra Nevada batholith, the Bear Valley Intrusive Suite (BVIS) exposes a contemporaneously constructed ~ 30 km thick intrusive suite, and thus is ideal for this type of examination. Here we present detailed petrography and mineral major and trace element data for the BVIS. The deepest exposed portion of the BVIS (8–9 kbars) is composed of heterogeneous mafic igneous intrusions of olivine metagabbro, olivine-hornblende orthopyroxenite, olivine-bearing hornblende norite, hornblende norite, hornblende gabbronorite, hornblendite and hornblende gabbro. Shallower crustal intrusions (3–7 kbars) are comparatively homogeneous and dominated by hypersthene-bearing and hypersthene-free tonalites. Using amphibole-plagioclase geothermometry, we show that the mafic lower crustal intrusions crystallized over a wide temperature range from 850 to 1070 °C, highlighting mafic igneous fractionation during isobaric cooling in the lower crust of the Sierran arc, while tonalitic liquids were emplaced at temperatures