Hot semifluid material found beneath the surface of Earth
Magma (from grc " "" ()" 'thick unguent') is the molten or semi-molten natural material from which all igneous rocks are formed. Magma (sometimes colloquially but incorrectly referred to as "lava") is found beneath the surface of the Earth, and evidence of magmatism has also been discovered on other terrestrial planets and some natural satellites. Besides molten rock, magma may also contain suspended crystals and gas bubbles.
Magma is produced by melting of the mantle or the crust in various tectonic settings, which on Earth include subduction zones, continental rift zones, mid-ocean ridges and hotspots. Mantle and crustal melts migrate upwards through the crust where they are thought to be stored in magma chambers or trans-crustal crystal-rich mush zones. During magma's storage in the crust, its composition may be modified by fractional crystallization, contamination with crustal melts, magma mixing, and degassing. Following its ascent through the crust, magma may feed a volcano and be extruded as lava, or it may solidify underground to form an intrusion, such as a dike, a sill, a laccolith, a pluton, or a batholith.
While the study of magma has relied on observing magma after its transition into a lava flow, magma has been encountered in situ three times during geothermal drilling projects, twice in Iceland (see Use in energy production) and once in Hawaii.
Physical and chemical properties.
Magma consists of liquid rock that usually contains suspended solid crystals. As magma approaches the surface and the overburden pressure drops, dissolved gases bubble out of the liquid, so that magma near the surface consists of materials in solid, liquid, and gas phases.
Composition.
Most magma is rich in silica. Rare nonsilicate magma can form by local melting of nonsilicate mineral deposits or by separation of a magma into separate immiscible silicate and nonsilicate liquid phases.
Silicate magmas are molten mixtures dominated by oxygen and silicon, the most abundant chemical elements in the Earth's crust, with smaller quantities of aluminium, calcium, magnesium, iron, sodium, and potassium, and minor amounts of many other elements. Petrologists routinely express the composition of a silicate magma in terms of the weight or molar mass fraction of the oxides of the major elements (other than oxygen) present in the magma.
Because many of the properties of a magma (such as its viscosity and temperature) are observed to correlate with silica content, silicate magmas are divided into four chemical types based on silica content: "felsic", "intermediate", "mafic", and "ultramafic".
Felsic magmas.
"Felsic" or silicic magmas have a silica content greater than 63%. They include rhyolite and dacite magmas. With such a high silica content, these magmas are extremely viscous, ranging from 108 cP (105 Pa⋅s) for hot rhyolite magma at to 1011 cP (108 Pa⋅s) for cool rhyolite magma at . For comparison, water has a viscosity of about 1 cP (0.001 Pa⋅s). Because of this very high viscosity, felsic lavas usually erupt explosively to produce pyroclastic (fragmental) deposits. However, rhyolite lavas occasionally erupt effusively to form lava spines, lava domes or "coulees" (which are thick, short lava flows). The lavas typically fragment as they extrude, producing block lava flows. These often contain obsidian.
Felsic lavas can erupt at temperatures as low as . Unusually hot ( ;950 °C; ;1,740 °F) rhyolite lavas, however, may flow for distances of many tens of kilometres, such as in the Snake River Plain of the northwestern United States.
Intermediate magmas.
"Intermediate" or andesitic magmas contain 52% to 63% silica, and are lower in aluminium and usually somewhat richer in magnesium and iron than felsic magmas. Intermediate lavas form andesite domes and block lavas, and may occur on steep composite volcanoes, such as in the Andes. They are also commonly hotter, in the range of ). Because of their lower silica content and higher eruptive temperatures, they tend to be much less viscous, with a typical viscosity of 3.5 × 106 cP (3,500 Pa⋅s) at . This is slightly greater than the viscosity of smooth peanut butter. Intermediate magmas show a greater tendency to form phenocrysts. Higher iron and magnesium tends to manifest as a darker groundmass, including amphibole or pyroxene phenocrysts.
Mafic magmas.
"Mafic" or basaltic magmas have a silica content of 52% to 45%. They are typified by their high ferromagnesian content, and generally erupt at temperatures of . Viscosities can be relatively low, around 104 to 105 cP (10 to 100 Pa⋅s), although this is still many orders of magnitude higher than water. This viscosity is similar to that of ketchup. Basalt lavas tend to produce low-profile shield volcanoes or flood basalts, because the fluidal lava flows for long distances from the vent. The thickness of a basalt lava, particularly on a low slope, may be much greater than the thickness of the moving lava flow at any one time, because basalt lavas may "inflate" by supply of lava beneath a solidified crust. Most basalt lavas are of "ʻAʻā" or "pāhoehoe" types, rather than block lavas. Underwater, they can form pillow lavas, which are rather similar to entrail-type pahoehoe lavas on land.
Ultramafic magmas.
"Ultramafic" magmas, such as picritic basalt, komatiite, and highly magnesian magmas that form boninite, take the composition and temperatures to the extreme. All have a silica content under 45%. Komatiites contain over 18% magnesium oxide, and are thought to have erupted at temperatures of . At this temperature there is practically no polymerization of the mineral compounds, creating a highly mobile liquid. Viscosities of komatiite magmas are thought to have been as low as 100 to 1000 cP (0.1 to 1 Pa⋅s), similar to that of light motor oil. Most ultramafic lavas are no younger than the Proterozoic, with a few ultramafic magmas known from the Phanerozoic in Central America that are attributed to a hot mantle plume. No modern komatiite lavas are known, as the Earth's mantle has cooled too much to produce highly magnesian magmas.
Alkaline magmas.
Some silicic magmas have an elevated content of alkali metal oxides (sodium and potassium), particularly in regions of continental rifting, areas overlying deeply subducted plates, or at intraplate hotspots. Their silica content can range from ultramafic (nephelinites, basanites and tephrites) to felsic (trachytes). They are more likely to be generated at greater depths in the mantle than subalkaline magmas. Olivine nephelinite magmas are both ultramafic and highly alkaline, and are thought to have come from much deeper in the mantle of the Earth than other magmas.
Non-silicate magmas.
Some lavas of unusual composition have erupted onto the surface of the Earth. These include:
Magmatic gases.
The concentrations of different gases can vary considerably. Water vapor is typically the most abundant magmatic gas, followed by carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. Other principal magmatic gases include hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen fluoride.
The solubility of magmatic gases in magma depends on pressure, magma composition, and temperature. Magma that is extruded as lava is extremely dry, but magma at depth and under great pressure can contain a dissolved water content in excess of 10%. Water is somewhat less soluble in low-silica magma than high-silica magma, so that at 1,100 °C and 0.5 GPa, a basaltic magma can dissolve 8% while a granite pegmatite magma can dissolve 11% . However, magmas are not necessarily saturated under typical conditions.
Carbon dioxide is much less soluble in magmas than water, and frequently separates into a distinct fluid phase even at great depth. This explains the presence of carbon dioxide fluid inclusions in crystals formed in magmas at great depth.
Rheology.
Viscosity is a key melt property in understanding the behaviour of magmas. Whereas temperatures in common silicate lavas range from about for felsic lavas to for mafic lavas, the viscosity of the same lavas ranges over seven orders of magnitude, from 104 cP (10 Pa⋅s) for mafic lava to 1011 cP (108 Pa⋅s) for felsic magmas. The viscosity is mostly determined by composition but is also dependent on temperature. The tendency of felsic lava to be cooler than mafic lava increases the viscosity difference.
The silicon ion is small and highly charged, and so it has a strong tendency to coordinate with four oxygen ions, which form a tetrahedral arrangement around the much smaller silicon ion. This is called a "silica tetrahedron". In a magma that is low in silicon, these silica tetrahedra are isolated, but as the silicon content increases, silica tetrahedra begin to partially polymerize, forming chains, sheets, and clumps of silica tetrahedra linked by bridging oxygen ions. These greatly increase the viscosity of the magma.
The tendency towards polymerization is expressed as NBO/T, where NBO is the number of non-bridging oxygen ions and T is the number of network-forming ions. Silicon is the main network-forming ion, but in magmas high in sodium, aluminium also acts as a network former, and ferric iron can act as a network former when other network formers are lacking. Most other metallic ions reduce the tendency to polymerize and are described as network modifiers. In a hypothetical magma formed entirely from melted silica, NBO/T would be 0, while in a hypothetical magma so low in network formers that no polymerization takes place, NBO/T would be 4. Neither extreme is common in nature, but basalt magmas typically have NBO/T between 0.6 and 0.9, andesitic magmas have NBO/T of 0.3 to 0.5, and rhyolitic magmas have NBO/T of 0.02 to 0.2. Water acts as a network modifier, and dissolved water drastically reduces melt viscosity. Carbon dioxide neutralizes network modifiers, so dissolved carbon dioxide increases the viscosity. Higher-temperature melts are less viscous, since more thermal energy is available to break bonds between oxygen and network formers.
Most magmas contain solid crystals of various minerals, fragments of exotic rocks known as xenoliths and fragments of previously solidified magma. The crystal content of most magmas gives them thixotropic and shear thinning properties. In other words, most magmas do not behave like Newtonian fluids, in which the rate of flow is proportional to the shear stress. Instead, a typical magma is a Bingham fluid, which shows considerable resistance to flow until a stress threshold, called the yield stress, is crossed. This results in plug flow of partially crystalline magma. A familiar example of plug flow is toothpaste squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. The toothpaste comes out as a semisolid plug, because shear is concentrated in a thin layer in the toothpaste next to the tube, and only here does the toothpaste behave as a fluid. Thixotropic behavior also hinders crystals from settling out of the magma. Once the crystal content reaches about 60%, the magma ceases to behave like a fluid and begins to behave like a solid. Such a mixture of crystals with melted rock is sometimes described as "crystal mush".
Magma is typically also viscoelastic, meaning it flows like a liquid under low stresses, but once the applied stress exceeds a critical value, the melt cannot dissipate the stress fast enough through relaxation alone, resulting in transient fracture propagation. Once stresses are reduced below the critical threshold, the melt viscously relaxes once more and heals the fracture.
Temperature.
Temperatures of molten lava, which is magma extruded onto the surface, are almost all in the range , but very rare carbonatite magmas may be as cool as , and komatiite magmas may have been as hot as . Magma has occasionally been encountered during drilling in geothermal fields, including drilling in Hawaii that penetrated a dacitic magma body at a depth of . The temperature of this magma was estimated at . Temperatures of deeper magmas must be inferred from theoretical computations and the geothermal gradient.
Most magmas contain some solid crystals suspended in the liquid phase. This indicates that the temperature of the magma lies between the solidus, which is defined as the temperature at which the magma completely solidifies, and the liquidus, defined as the temperature at which the magma is completely liquid. Calculations of solidus temperatures at likely depths suggests that magma generated beneath areas of rifting starts at a temperature of about . Magma generated from mantle plumes may be as hot as . The temperature of magma generated in subduction zones, where water vapor lowers the melting temperature, may be as low as .
Density.
Magma densities depend mostly on composition, iron content being the most important parameter.
Magma expands slightly at lower pressure or higher temperature. When magma approaches the surface, its dissolved gases begin to bubble out of the liquid. These bubbles had significantly reduced the density of the magma at depth and helped