Phase equilibria and microstructural constraints on the high‐T building of the Kohistan island arc: The Jijal garnet granulites, northern Pakistan

The Kohistan island arc represents a >50 km thick and completely exposed Late Cretaceous–Eocene Neo‐Tethyan island arc sequence between the Indian and Eurasian plates in the western Himalaya. At the base of the Kohistan Arc, the Jijal Complex exposes a continuous sequence from ultramafic upper mantle rocks to mafic rocks of the lower crust across the Moho transition zone. In the shallower mafic section of the Jijal Complex, widespread garnet–clinopyroxene gabbros are uniform in assemblage but show a spectrum of microstructural variation involving two distinguishable styles of garnet growth. Uncertainty surrounds the genetic origin of these equilibria across the sequence which have been variably proposed to derive either from (a) dehydration melting of amphibole‐bearing precursor rocks, (b) subsolidus recrystallization of gabbronorite, or (c) primary magmatic crystallization. Owing to extensive high‐T re‐equilibration, compositional records of magmatic precursors and the pre‐peak evolution across the complex have been erased. However, quantitative textural analysis evidences a progressively increasing departure from microstructural randomness from deep to shallow levels of the upper Jijal Complex. This is interpreted to reflect the increased propensity for shallow garnet–clinopyroxene gabbros to have been derived from solid‐state recrystallization of a cumulate gabbronorite precursor, resulting in the development of coronitic garnet microstructures. In the deepest portions of the mafic sequence, both cumulate textures and thermodynamic modelling attest to the basal levels of the Kohistan arc crust at ~10–14 kbar crystallizing primary magmatic garnet and clinopyroxene from low H2O (